In the 95 days there used to be Microsoft bob that would assist users with various things. The project failed and MS has sort of resurrected what was once MS bob into Microsoft Agent. You can Demo Agent here. The MS UI team also created a 3D UI called TaskGallery that can be found here, watch the video. I do remember seeing a 3rd party rip off of TaskGallery but I don't remember from where. I think Longhorn will use hardware accelerated rendering of the UI much the same way Apple is doing it now with Quartz Extreme™. I think it's a good idea because it should offload the process from the CPU and when you are on your desktop your graphics card is not doing much anyway. The additional hardware requirements for the graphics card should mean better cards. Game developers often have to build a game capable of running on the lowest common denominator. What I would like to see in Longhorn is: Removal of many of the useless services that run at boot on XP. (UPnP as an example) This would make the system boot faster, run faster, and crash less. Removal of some backwards compatibility This would remove extra files, and overhead on the system. If are still using software made for 95 you need to just keep XP se. Better native theme support and lighter themes As someone stated, it would remove the need for StyleXP and also bring theming to joe sixpack. The lighter theme is out of my distaste for the heavy UI of XP and soon longhorn. I really like the 2k pro look and would like to see some native light temes like the famous watercolor theme that was seen in the early XP betas. In general, while some of the new features look useful, I don't want MS to forget the speed/security/stability advantages of designing the OS for a small footprint.
