>Users find it easier? Really? As opposed to what? Why would a very non-standard menu be easier? What you are describing will cause your program to operate differently than all other Windows programs. I can't see how that would be easier. In fact, I would find it confusing and frustrating.

Actually the Windows paradigm was frustrating. In DOS apps we had the menu staying there until the user presses ESC, clicks outside of the menu or navigates to another place in the menu system.

When switching to Windows, my worst nightmare was Office and getting used to where things are in the menus. In the earlier versions (2.0, 6.0) it first took me minutes to find something I needed in the menu, and then even more minutes to find it again. And then they invented the pseudo-intelligent menus where bars would vanish when they weren't used, which somehow included the one I used a minute ago. Specially it annoys a lot when you want to do three or four operations in a row, and they're listed one after another somewhere in a popup - and as soon as you selected the first one, the menu vanishes, and you not only have to navigate to the same location, but you have no idea what was the last thing you did.

This is an old pet peeve of mine (sorry for the rant), and I had it solved once, got my menus to be sticky, and then forgot about the whole thing, because the apps I did didn't have that many things to put into the menus, and the issue became moot.

As for office apps, they learned how to use toolbars better, or how to get more logic into their menus, so finding things isn't that hard anymore. Or they all got us trained to the current interface, so it worked its way into our intuition.