Here are some of the workarounds that I've used when forced to put up with Vistaspawn:
1) Install Classic Shell and set as much stuff as possible to the way things worked in Win 9x
2) If you're in Vista or Win7, a "Classic" theme should be available in your list of themes. This has no functional purpose but will enhance the old-school feel. The Classic theme is not available for Win8 or Win10; you'll have to modify the start button, taskbar color, taskbar opacity, etc. manually to make them look normal.
3) Set taskbar icons to small. This will reduce the taskbar size from double-thickness to normal thickness.
4) Whenever installing a program, remove "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)" from the installation path. Alternatively, you can disable UAC, then seize ownership of those two folders according to the instructions presented here:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com...m-files-folder this will allow you to edit any file in either of these folders.
5) If you want a certain program to always appear on the "open with..." menu when right-clicking on a file, and Windows is giving you a hard time, you can force certain file type associations in Control Panel -> Default Programs -> "Associate a file type or protocol with a program". There used to be a way to give these associations custom names, like "OpEn iN dGiNdEx yOu wHoRe" or "I have some Notepadding to do!", back when Folder Options had a File Types tab; if anyone can tell me if this is still possible, I'd be grateful.
6) certain problems require restarts to fix, but Win8 and Win10 have this funny thing where all they really do is log you out and then log you back in when you tell them to reboot. This makes those problems harder to fix. You can disable this in Power Options, or in the Classic Shell settings.
7) There's nothing you can do about the lack of support for using animated gifs as wallpapers. Sorry.
8) Downloading or saving directly to C:\ can be re-enabled by lowering the UAC slider to its lowest level
9) When you go to "Sort By...", your normal options might be replaced with ones that you don't want. For example, if a folder has a lot of WAV files in it, Windows will stupidly assume that the folder is for music, and will replace your normal options with Name, #, Title, Contributing Artists, and Album. To fix this, right-click on the folder, select Properties, go to the Customize tab, and set "Optimize this folder for..." to "General". You can also apply this automatically to all sub-folders.
10) If you want to run a 16-bit Windows program in a 64-bit version of windows, you'll need something like Win3mu.
I wish I had figured this crap out a decade ago. It would have saved me a LOT of headaches, a lot of bitching about how much Vista/7/8/10 suck, and a lot of time invested into figuring out how to keep using XP for as long as possible. I've finally, FINALLY gotten Win7 to a state that's about 80% acceptable (I'm still butthurt about the animated wallpapers) and now we're losing Win7 next year.
*gives double middle fingers to Microshaft*