I am writing this using Windows Live Writer, a program which I consider to be a bit of an anomaly. It’s an anomaly because unlike most of the other programs in the Windows Live “suite”, it’s self contained and behaves itself, and doesn’t try to replace a built in component of Windows Vista. (The other exception of course is Windows Live Messenger which doesn’t count since it is simply MSN Messenger with a new name).

The two programs I have the biggest beef with are Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail. I have had both installed on my system off and on several times. You’d think that given how much I am bothered by these programs I would just leave them be an pretend they don’t exist, but for some reason every few months I get the urge to give them another chance, because, sadly, they do have a few nice features I’d like to have that are lacking in the programs they replace.

The programs they replace? Well actually it’s not that simple. You see these programs according to all appearances and Microsoft’s own statement are supposed to replace Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Mail, respectively, except that they don’t. Rather than offering a nice clean upgrade, through Windows Update, to these two programs that shipped as part of Vista, they must be installed separately via the Windows Live installer, and get installed as completely separate programs, leaving your system with two nearly identical programs, the older version of which cannot be removed. This totally bizarre choice by Microsoft is truly maddening. In the end I uninstalled the Windows live version because the only useful upgrade was a panoramic stitching function which I can get in a far more elegant fashion elsewhere.

Windows Live Mail is by far the worse offender though. All of the above complaints apply equally to this program, but with a few more. Microsoft taunts us to install this program by promising access to Hotmail and other web based services from within a desktop application. The promise of having one central access point for all email account is enticing, to bad the rest of the program sucks. Since Windows Live Mail is a replacement for Windows Mail that doesn’t actually replace Windows mail, there are a lot of loose ends left over once this program is installed. You know those links to the Internet and Email at the top of the Vista start Menu? By right clicking on the start buttons and viewing properties and then customize, you would see the two options for the email link by default are “Windows Mail” and “Windows Live Mail”. These actually refer to the default Windows Mail App and Hotmail respectively, due to the fact that Hotmail was originally going to re-branded as “Windows Live Mail”, and the new “Windows Live Mail” client was going to be called “Windows Live Mail Desktop”. Confused yet? So logically to solve this confusion the Windows Live Mail installer should have updated these links to reflect the new names of the Apps. Alas it does not, so after installing Windows Live Mail on your PC the option “Windows Live Mail” still means “Hotmail”, and “Windows Mail “now refers to the desktop version of “Windows Live Mail” even though this program didn’t actually overwrite the program is replaces and continue to co-exist with it on the PC.

Nowhere is this more evident that in the Vista folder “Contacts”. If you have installed Window Live Mail on your PC and then open up your Contacts folder and right click a contact and choose Actions|E-mail, Windows will open up the old version of Windows Mail, rather than Windows Live Mail, regardless of whether you have stripped Windows Mail of all it’s defaults and given them to Windows Live Mail via control panel. Huh?! Further to that, Windows Live Mail renders your Contacts folder virtually useless as it now uses your Live Messenger Contacts, which are remotely stored, rather than than the Vista Contacts folder which was for the first time an elegant and well designed feature in this version of Windows. This would not be such a problem is your “Windows Live” contacts new how to talk to the “Contacts” folder and keep everything in sync, but they don’t. The only way to do it is to manually import or export from Vista to Windows Live, which invariably results in duplicate entries. Even this might be tolerable, if annoying, if Windows Live Mail included a feature to “clean up duplicate entries”, but it doesn’t. To do this you have to load up Hotmail and do it from there. Talk about sloppy design.

Until Microsoft fixes these applications, I have no use for them on my PC, and will grudgingly do without a handful of features that would nice nice to have but are ultimately not worth dealing with the sloppy handling of these upgrades and don’t actually upgrade.

Windows Live Writer is a job well done, however.