My biggest gripe about running Windows 7 on a netbook is not the performance but the size of the start button and taskbar on the 1024x600 display. Instead of the usual bottom position, I like to have the taskbar on the side as it is easier to manage multiple open applications/windows. In Windows 7 (and Vista I guess...) the start button and taskbar's width seem to have ballooned, even turning on small icons does not help.
Windows XP:
Windows 7 beta:

Windows 7 RC 1:
Comments
Having a fixed distinguishible livery visible from afar is free corporate advertising on milions of "mini advertising pannels" around the world. It can be worth to check out the guys who got MS in Europe to let choose a different web navigator, and have them force microsoft to reimplement size control.
But I think the best (most global) solution is themes (I can't quite make if there is a difference between "themes" and "styles").
When you search for "themes", you can see that some of them look rather compact. Unfortunately the people in the "theme" business are graphic artists who care more about displaying their nifty background BMP on a 2048 x *** display than functionality (you can't even make out the exact compactness of the adress bar from their screencaptures) .
So I had no luck looking for "Windows 7 theme compact 1024 x ... (but I only devoted 20 minutes to this search). Let everybody know someone finds this theme
because i'm in the exact same situation : i loved the width of the windows xp vertical taskbar and i'm unable to do it on Vista :(
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