Minor gripe for the day. Programs that work well, but tell you everytime they do there job, even when you don't want to know. Two cases: Sauce Reader (any RSS Reader, I guess) and the Spam Bayes and Outlook Combo.
Sauce Reader: Blogs are now a necessary part of work related research/upkeep, but they don't have to be a "contstant" part, so desktop popups, and notifications, are unecessary and disruptive (to me, at least). Fortunately, you can turn that off, but you've still got the tray icon telling you you've got unread items. It would be nice if you could run the collection program somewhere else, and just collect items when you want to read them, instead of having to have the aggregator open on the machine at all times, to get the RSS items.
SpamBayes/Outlook: Obviously, email is a critical part of work related tools, out spam is the bane of our existance. SpamBayes, in conjunction with Outlook, does a great job of filtering out Spam, but it's got this major flaw of not being able to remove the envelope icon if there is only spam emails, so the spam is being filtered, but it's being just as disruptive. The SpamBayes people blame Outlook here. I know I've seen instances where programmatic functions didn't respond the same as a "GUI" counterpart (IE, right click mark as read wasn't the same as MarkAsRead(), so I don't know)
I just know that I've got to be able to do something about the distractions from programs that are supposed to help me be more productive <frown>
Oh, and I've already had 3 or 4 popups get through XP2's popup blocker, now that's frustrating... How long will it be before everybody shifts over to this new method (whatever it is) and will MS counter it?