No, I don't mean it's time to fire people. I mean it's time to dust off some of the legacy baggage in Vista. Have you seen the size of the ISO lately? I mean, it's great that Beta 2 was 3.2GB and that RC1 will only be about 2.6GB (most of the debug code has been removed)... but Vista still has too much junk in the trunk. Case in point: I was spelunking through the Vista binaries with a resource viewer, and what I saw shocked me. THOUSANDS of old bitmaps and icons remain compiled into Vista dlls and executables. Some of these files refer to Windows codenames, and should have been taken out when the codename got a real name. Case in point, this little gem from a version of XP that has been assimilated by Vista. Can you guess what it is from?
I can understand keeping a few things around for compatibility, but this? Microsoft built a dependancy analyzer for XNA Build... can't they build one for Windows binaries? Yeah, I know what the response is going to be... "Some third party applications use our resources and we don't want to break them." Personally, I think breaking them is the only way you're going to find out who is using them, so that they can maybe repackage it to use their own dang resources. But that's just my uneducated opinion. What do YOU think?