Just ask anyone who's seen Spiderman 3; good ideas seldom survive bad execution.

The developers at Microsoft had some great ideas while designing Vista, but poor implementation turned many of those great concepts into lousy, annoying features. To be fair, Vista inherited most of these well-intentioned flaws from earlier versions of Windows. But it either failed to fix them or didn't even try.

Here are ten of Vista's most irritating flops, along with quick fixes and workarounds. Let's start with one that's absolutely unique to Vista, and almost universally hated by those who use it.

User Account Control

People do some things in Windows--such as install destructive applications or edit the Registry--that deserve a stern "Are you sure you know what you're doing" warning. These situations may even warrant having to prove you're an administrator before you're allowed to continue.

But Vista's User Account Control (UAC) fails to give enough feedback to users; there's often no way to know why a given act is considered dangerous. Even worse, Vista's designer's went overboard, forcing people to click through a UAC prompt to set the clock or manually start a backup. The result: People get annoyed and learn to ignore the UAC, effectively removing any protection it might provide.

Here are three imperfect ways to stop UAC annoyances. One minor problem they all share: Every so often when you boot, Vista will warn you that the UAC is off. You can just ignore the warnings, in much the same way you've already learned to ignore the UAC itself.

1. Just turn it off. This easy fix works well in an administrator account, but it renders standard accounts almost unusable. Select Start, Control Panel, User Accounts, and click Turn User Account Control on or off. Select Continue at the UAC prompt, and on the next screen, uncheck Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer. Click OK and reboot.

2. Use TweakUAC. This free program can turn UAC off for Administrator accounts while leaving it on for everyone else, which is a relatively safe and convenient compromise. Just run the program, select Switch UAC to the quiet mode, and click OK.

3. Fine-tune your system's UAC settings. This only works in Vista Business or Ultimate. Select Start, type secpol.msc, and press Enter. Navigate the left pane as if it was Windows Explorer to the Security Settings\Local Policy\Security Options folder. In the right pane, scroll down to the bottom for nine options controlling how UAC behaves. If you're not sure what these settings actually change, see the helpful guide at Walker News.

The One-Way Firewall

Windows' built-in firewall has always suffered from the same flaw: While blocking suspicious stuff that comes in, it does nothing about what your PC sends out. Since an infected PC can mass-mail spam and forward your credit card numbers to someone without your better interest in mind, that's an important shortcoming.

Vista supposedly fixed this problem with the addition of a firewall capable of watching and blocking outbound traffic. But that capability is turned off by default. And Vista's designers forgot to put the controls that turn it on in a place where you're likely to look for it: the Windows Firewall Settings dialog box.

Here are two solutions:

1. Go to the secret place where you can turn on outgoing protection. Click Start, type firewall, and select Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. Click Windows Firewall Properties. The first three of the resulting dialog box's four tabs contain an Outbound Connections pull-down menu. In all three, select Block.

2. Get another, better firewall. Even with two-way protection enabled, Windows' firewall is a feeble guardian. On the other hand, the free Comodo Firewall Pro came out tops in independent testing, even compared to well-known commercial products like Norton Internet Security. (According to Matousec's Firewall Challenge.)

System Restore

Here's a great idea: Give Windows a built-in, automated backup app. Restoring a system backup should fix problems like corrupted boot files, virus infections, Trojan horse installations, and Windows' own natural, gradual deterioration--all without adversely affecting your data.

But you can't permanently save a System Restore backup (called a restore point) to external media. Thus, while System Restore can usually return Windows to last Wednesday's state, it's generally useless for bringing everything back to that perfect condition it was in last year. What's more, restoring your system depends on having multiple restore points, so that one corrupt backup makes subsequent ones useless.

The best solution would be a system backup program that leaves your data alone while backing up everything else to a removable disk--preferably a bootable one. I've yet to find such a program.

Genie Backup Manager Home comes closer than anything else I've found.  Genie's Disaster Recovery option insists on backing up everything on the drive, but you can restore the system while keeping the data unchanged by deselecting your data folders when you restore a Disaster Recovery backup. You can try this $50 general-purpose backup program before you buy it.

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