I picked up this nifty little trick on a forum while searching for company in my misery over the "Windows 7 QuickLaunch". Apparently, "Toolbars" still exist in full force under Windows 7, and if you’ve ever messed with them before, you’ll know QuickLaunch was always just one of those folders. The simple way to resurrect the QuickLaunch bar is to:

1. Right click on the taskbar and go to Toolbars
2. Click "New Toolbar…"
3. Navigate to "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch"
4. Select that directory.

You technically don’t even need to use that specific directory— any empty directory will do (you can make one in a safe place).

It will show up on the right by default, but you can right click on the taskbar again and unlock the taskbar to move it back to the left.

Voila, ze Quick Launch, she lives!

This means I can completely avoid using the horribly unintuitive pinned icon behaviour that is supposedly "superior". Better yet, by using the old QuickLaunch, I even get back all that wasted horizontal space that comes with the pinned icons!

The following video illustrates what happens when you try to minimized a "pinned" (similar to XP/Vista "Quicklaunch") application to the tray. This shows how utterly confusing this common Windows behaviour is going to become once Windows 7 comes out. Hopefully Microsoft will rethink the taskbar before releasing the OS.

Another related side-issue:

You cannot (easily) open multiple instances of a pinned application (unless it minimized to tray, ironically enough). The "pinned" icon will become the actual taskbar window, so clicking it afterwards will toggle minimize/maximize, not open a new instance. The only way to open a new instance is to right click and then click "Open". This will be extremely annoying for users who are used to opening multiple windows of IE, for instance (those who don’t tab-browse).

I’m not sure if Microsoft forgot that in Windows (unlike OS X), programs can be opened multiple times, and in fact it’s quite common to do so. They seem to be trying way too hard to emulate Apple in this OS that they forgot Windows is not (and should not become) OS X.

Edit (01/11/09): Turns out the QuickLaunch still exists, I just didn’t realize it was so easy to get back. Read about it here. The solution to the above issue is to just avoid pinned apps altogether and stick to the QuickLaunch.