You can just drop the short-named .lnk files in your win dir if you want and still be able to run them as normal, then you don't even need to add the path= entry. I just like to keep them in a separate dir so when I uninstall an app I can remove the associated link easilly and keep the windows directory uncluttered. Also I suppose if you get down to the nitty gritty, having it in an alphabetically 'earlier' directory than 'windows' or 'winnt', and separate from all the windows files, saves some time the systems takes in finding the link... but I doubt it'd be a noticeable difference for any human unless you had a 10-year-old system dir with tons of dead weight from the years of poor windows cache-handling.

I know whatcha mean about the firewall thing, I recently reinstalled the os on my laptop and i connected to the net so I could download zonealarm off my main machine. In the 10 minutes it took to download zonealarm, a valla virus managed to weasle its way into my system through RPC's.

I'm glad to not have to defrag in XP or wait for load times in XP or check windows update every week for new XP exploit fixes or any of the other countless hassles XP users face. W2K is the best kernel they've released yet. Well, 2K3 is actually a bit better as it uses a few XP technologies without all the impress-the-low-iq-end-user crap they stuffed into xp... but still too insecure for my liking, I'm giving it at least another 6 months or so before I'll feel comfortable that all the serious exploits have been found and fixed.

I hear ya with the My Fascist Naming Scheme stuff.. If they're going to enforce certain directories they should have a control panel to organize/name/etc them.

OT is good, keeps people on their toes - they get the subconscious message that they have to actually read all the threads if they don't wanna miss anything, not just scan the titles ;)