It's not just Windows. Microsoft has a virus design team. Look what they did to visual studio. The new visual studio flat design (from 2012) is really awful. All caps in menu. No color in icons. Everybody hates those changes.
Well at least the VS desgin team has to listen when there's enough complaining: Visual Studio 2013 has been available for a while and it fixes all problems you list by undoing those changes.
Of course, everything in a Microsoft product can be customised by changing or adding a registry key somewhere. The all-caps menus in Visual Studio are no exception.
Don't know what they are thinking!