tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
I much prefer the new superbar. Try it for a week. Soon enough you'll only use the windows menu for searching and shutting down the PC.
IIRC Windows 7 Starter Edition doesn't have them but a cursory search didn't show up any solutions for disabling it in other editions.
You can put your own shortcuts (your HDDs) there if you want but as for removing the other stuff you can't. To ease into it, go into Folder Options and disable "Show all folders" and "Automatically expand to current folder".
I also preferred Vista's way of doing this as it allowed you to hide everything except your custom shortcuts... oh well.
I just dont like it. I want to have easy acces to rdp, desktop, firefox etc. Pinning those apps makes me crazy because everything gets clutterd.
I found solutions for my problems though. You can add a regkey to delay the preview time. Not the cleanest way but atleast I dont get to see it anymore and I managed to get rid of libries and homegroups and used favs to add shortcuts to my disks and server.