For Windows 7, Microsoft has redesigned the Taskbar in a way that closely mimics the Mac OS X Dock, but expands on it with Jump Lists, Live Thumbnails, and some other features. The problem is that in doing so Microsoft has ported some of the worst aspects of Mac OS X to Windows. In a detailed article, Paul Thurrott detailed some of the new Taskbar’s problems, such as the confusing mixture of shortcuts and running applications.

But I want to address one problem in particular. Whenever I’m working on my computer, I’m not working with applications, I’m working with documents. I don’t want Microsoft Word, I want my research paper. I don’t want Firefox, I want AustLII. With the default configuration on Windows 7, whenever I want to switch to what I want to do, I have an extra click. I have to click the Word icon and then select the document that I want:

The other problem is that there is no way to rearrange the documents. Microsoft finally implemented support for rearranging items on the Taskbar. (Why this wasn’t implemented earlier, leaving users to rely on third-party programs like Taskbar Shuffle and Taskix, is a mystery.) But Microsoft provided no way to rearrange individual documents, stranding my (blank) blog post between two (blank) legal documents.

There are applications for which the new interface makes sense. Windows Media Player is an obvious example:

You never have multiple WMP windows open, so there’s no issue. It’s also important that you can ungroup the documents:

But now you have the Vista Taskbar with large icons and shortcuts scattered all over the place. And there’s still no way to rearrange the documents. What’s the point? In fact, if you set the Taskbar to use small icons like this:

… you just get the Windows Vista Taskbar in Windows 7, so long as you get rid of any pinned applications.

Microsoft should, at least, implement support for rearranging individual documents on the Taskbar. In the default, grouped configuration, this requires nothing special: simply drag the live thumbnails to their desired location. In the ungrouped configuration, this can be done without any hotkeys: dragging any document moves it within its group first and, only when it’s at either end of its group, does the whole group move.

Probably the single biggest bug in the Windows 7 Beta was the MP3 corruption bug described in KB961367, which could cut a few seconds from the beginning of MP3 files that had sufficiently large tags. A patch for that bug was distributed via Windows Update to beta participants.

When adding my collection of MP3s to the WMP 12 library, I found that some files were not added correctly. They appeared in the library, but WMP displayed only the filename, instead of the title, artist, album, etc.

At first, I thought the MP3s had been corrupted by the earlier bug or otherwise. However, I found that adding just those files to the library worked fine. Windows Explorer also correctly read the tags. Looking into it further, I found that WMP 12 in the Windows 7 Beta has a massive memory leak when adding files to the library:

WMP appears to read the tags from the MP3s into memory, but never releases that memory after it’s done with the file. Since many of my MP3s have very large album art (several megabytes), WMP continues to chew up memory until it runs out. At that point, it continues to add the files to the library, but without reading out the tags.

If you don’t have enough MP3s with large album art and want to reproduce the bug, you can download this classic Leo Laporte podcast and add this 6.21 MB photo of Earth as album art. Then, copy the file 1000 or so times. You can use this PowerShell script to do so:

Add the folder with those MP3s to your music library, start Windows Media Player, and watch the memory usage skyrocket.

Solution: Fortunately, there is an easy fix you can use until Microsoft addresses the bug. When you start WMP for the first time, watch the memory usage in the Task Manager. If the memory usage gets too high, simply close WMP normally and start it again. WMP will resume scanning your library where it left off. You may have to repeat this multiple times, but WMP should add all the files without any problems this way.

If you tried to add your files before, you may need to delete the files in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player first.