So by now we have all the 10,001 Windows Vista annoyances documented all over the Internet. Maybe there is some opportunity for some little praise here.
The only copy of Vista I have installed and running exists in my deteriorating PC, one of its ailments being the PS/2 and USB ports behind totally toasted. These few years tolerated with the life-on-a-thread USB-PS/2 converter cable attached to the front-side USB ports. It is not a complete resolution however; on machine power up the keyboard will remain undetected until the OS loads.
So tonight I had the machine re-configured to boot up Vista (instead of the usual XP) so as to begin accumulating usage experience. Some hours of configuring TS/RDC and IIS 7 later, I inadvertenly clicked on the standby button when my intention was to restart the system. The system went into low-power state, which was clearly not what I needed. I kicked in the power button to get it to wake up, but to my dismay the motherboard sent the keyboard AWOL under this condition. There I was stuck on a lonely island of a logon graphic taunting me to enter my password.
Hard reboot? No need. A curious button at the lower left corner read this
What does "Ease of access" mean?
To my pleasant surprise it provides a variety of accessibility options to interact with the logon screen, one of them being an on-screen keyboard for me to use the mouse to key in the password.
Neat! What a saver.