Just further to my last comments on this subject...
Actually, it’s not just one extra application’s settings I have to fiddle with now to disable ClearType – it’s two! It seems that Outlook Express has a separate setting to turn off its ClearType, under the registry key:
HKCU\Identities\{...}\Software\Microsoft
\Outlook Express\5.0\Trident\Main\UseClearType
(Note: I haven’t tried it myself, so I can’t confirm whether this actually works or not)
So now there’s actually three different places I have to go to, in addition to the global setting in order to turn off ClearType. Two of those places (Word and Outlook Express 7) are ugly registry hacks!
What annoyed me even more is the response from Peter Gurevich when people complained about it:
Q4: Why is IE not using the system wide setting as default and why is it overwriting it?
A4: We believe strongly that this feature will enhance the user experience of a [sic] many users and believe that the best way to bring it to users is to turn it on by default independent of the system setting.
Basically, he’s saying that since the system-wide setting is too hard to find, they figure it’s better to enable it by default on an application-by-application basis. That is wrong, wrong, wrong! He goes on to say that it’s easier to get users to turn off a feature they don’t like than it is to turn on one they may not know about. Now that may be true, but I hardly see how it’s Internet Explorer’s prerogative to decide which features of Windows are beneficial to me. Maybe if ClearType is such an amazing feature and that nobody knows about, it could be turned on in a service pack of Windows – get people to turn off a feature they don’t like once, rather than doing it for every new Microsoft application that is ever released from now on.
OK, I think I’ve vented enough for today :)