The other day I sent an e-mail to a company (who may or may not remain nameless as time progresses) regarding a product that I have installed on all my computers.  I asked what the company's plans were to support Windows Vista, and if there was a beta I could help test.  Here's the reply I received.

Thank you for your recent inquiry. 

Microsoft will be releasing Vista to the Public on January 30th 2007, after which we will look into making our Software compatible with the new Operating System.

After the release?  Are you kidding me?  Surely no software company that depends on the Microsoft OS for their livelihood would be [insert absurdity] enough to wait until it was shipping on new computers before they "...look into making [their] Software compatible...."  And, I believe making this particular product compatible with Vista would be quite a non-trivial task.

I hope that Mr. Technical Support Specialist is just seriously uninformed.

This might be related to my earlier display rotation woes, but now some of my context menus are showing up to the left of my mouse cursor instead of the right.  For example, when I click my Quick Start menu or if right-click on the desktop, the pop-up menu is to the left of my mouse pointer.  I haven't been able to figure this one out yet.  It's not a show-stopper, but this is just frustrating.

[Update 2007-01-28] Oh, thank goodness I found the answer.  This was driving me up the wall.  Under Control Panel -> Tablet PC Settings I changed the "Handedness" to "Left-handed."  A litter counter-intuitive, but whatever.  Keep in mind, my laptop is not a tablet PC. 

I decided since Virtual PC 2007 RC was out, I'd give Windows Vista another try.  Everything had been working OK for the last couple of days.  However, when I came into work this morning, plugged everything up to my laptop and booted up, Vista decided to change my monitor orientation and rotate both my laptop display and my second monitor 90 degrees.  Not only that, but it changed my mouse so that when I moved it up and down, the pointer moved side to side (which of course is up and down relative to the new orientation).  Trying to navigate the display properties under this condition is like trying to trim your ear hair using two mirrors (oh wait... maybe you didn't need that mental picture).

Here's the nice part.  Under display properties (Control Panel -> Personalization -> Display Settings), monitor rotation/orientation was no where to be found.  I started to Google the issue (by now turning my head and half my body totally sideways).  I found some tips for certain display drivers that use keyboard shortcuts to change monitor rotation, but this didn't work for me.

After digging around, I finally found something.  Under Control Panel -> Tablet PC Settings I was able to change the screen orientation to "Primary landscape."  That fixed my laptop display, but didn't fix my 2nd monitor.  To fix the secondary display, I found that when I went to Control Panel -> Windows Mobility Center, and then clicked the button for "Connect display" for External Display, it magically rotated back to landscape.

How's that for intuitive??