I just got Win 7 with a new laptop. What I want to know is if Win 8 will let me get XP’s task bar back. For about a day and a half, my big question would have been what is Win 8 going to do about dropping off the internet. I solved that problem. Delete the unnecessary bloteware they load on. Clean up the start menu, and don’t give the computer permission to turn off wifi. I also had to reset my dual channel wifi to broadcast on different channels than my neighbors are using. It was never a problem with XP.
When I got my Win7 laptop, I immediately changed the desktop theme back to Windows Classic. That helped some.
I found a program called Classic Shell, which restores some of the XP-like functions:
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/