Some Vista irritations

I’ve been using Vista daily for a while now, and on balance I like it quite a bit. However, there are some things that irritate the dickens out of me, mostly because I haven’t figured out to escape them. I’m going to keep a running list in the hope that either people will suggest solutions, or that I’ll attract enough other people who have the same problems to gain critical mass.

1. My new #1: turning off offline file sync for an existing folder. It’s possible, but what a hassle!
2. Connecting and disconecting VPNs. I like the way XP and Mac OS X both do it: you get an icon in the system bar, and you can directly click it to disconnect. With XP, to connect I can hit Ctrl+Esc, T (for “Connect to”), <return> and be connected to my primary VPN. In Vista, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent, except for putting a shortcut on the desktop.
3. Bonus annoyance: after you close a connection, you get a dialog telling you it was closed, which you must dismiss.
4. The center scroll feature of the TrackPoint doesn’t work. Update: this was because I didn’t have the correct driver. Lenovo will be releasing full versions of all their Vista drivers at the end of January; the prerelease versions I have work quite well.
5. There’s not yet a working version of Verizon Access Manager, so I can’t use the spiffy integrated EvDO modem. Update: still no love on this. I’ve seen reports
6. I’m having fits with one particular client’s VPN implementation; I can usually connect, but I can’t reach most of the internal sites I need. If I connect at the same time from my XP machine, the connection is rock-solid, so it’s clearly a Vista oddity. Update: Turns out this is a Vista bug, slated for a QFE sometime in the future.