Vista adds some neat new behaviors for mouse users, but keyboard users seem to have taken a back seat. Just a few annoyances I noticed after using Vista for a few hours:

#1: Vista adds a new “message box on steroids” called the task dialog. It adds some sorely-needed features, but unfortunately, one handy Windows feature (common to message boxes and dialogs containing only buttons and labels) that it doesn’t implement is the capability to make a selection via a mnemonic letter without using the Alt key. For instance, the UAC dialogs are task dialogs and have choices like Allow or Continue, but you must press Alt+A or Alt+C to select those choices rather than A or C by itself.

#2: Too many tab stops to navigate panes in Windows Explorer (4 in XP vs. 8 in Vista), and the tab order is not intuitive (for instance, the list view precedes the column headers). Dedicated keys to jump directly to each pane are sorely needed.

#3: When launching an application from an Explorer view and a UAC prompt is displayed, when returning to the Explorer view, the keyboard focus is lost and you must tab 6 times to get focus back to the file list view.

#4: More steps to log off. Windows Vista: Windows, Right, Right, Right, L. Windows XP: Windows, L, Enter.