A solution?

I owned a copy of Object Desktop many, many moons ago, which did not run on Windows.  It was a discrete product back then, while today it seems to be a collection of things.

I haven't booted that OS outside of a VM in years, and have recently migrated from 32-bit XP to 64-bit Vista, to overcome some limitations of the former (mainly no PAE, so only 2.25GB out of 8GB usable, and no CrossfireX with more than 2 GPUs).

Vista is faster overall (though not in everything), and with UAC disabled, it's usable.  However, there are still some things I really despise about it, and I'm wondering if OD offers any kind of a solution.

1)  Start menu.  There's much to say against a system of exploding menus, for certain, but there's even more to say against a tiny little window with a scrollbar that can't be resized.

2)  Desktop folders.  Is it too much to ask that I get a simple container window that holds a bunch of icons?  I don't need a navigation pane, giant status pane, etc.  But when you hide them, they go away when you don't want them to, such as in Windows Explorer when you click on a folder in the navigation pane.

3)  Windows Explorer.  So what happens when you have a DVD drive selected, then eject the disc?  It goes away.  Have a bunch of discs you need to copy data from?  Better remember to click away before ejecting, or you'll have to relaunch Explorer and navigate back to the DVD drive.  I ended up using the command line, which doesn't give me the benefit of an overall progress indicator.

I guess the overall question is, does OD include only things to change how Vista looks, or can it fix some of the annoying ways it behaves?