>I'm not going to beat a dead horse here, well, maybe I am, but I still feel strongly that the optiongroup is the prefered control for a direct question of the user and the checkbox is the preferred control for a passive on/off flag.

I'll feed the dead horse then :-). For a question for the user that needs to be answered before further action, this is the job of a messagebox with yes/no buttons. Other 'questions', when options for an operation, can simply be stated as an imperitive sentence, and given a check box. Again, maybe this is just a difference in philosophy.

>Cooper's book is a great one, no doubt, but he's really full of shit on a lot of what he says but sometimes it takes you a long time in the school of hard knocks to discern where and how he is full of shit. For example, his diatribe about insulating the user from the file system is pure nonsense.

I completely agree on this one.

>Another concrete example: In Cooper's fantasy world, when you quit Word, changes would automatically be saved. He poo-poos the "do you want to save changes" dialog. He feels that users are too stupid to make that choice. Well, I knwo plenty of users who say "No" to that dialog because they screwed up the edit and are glad at the opportunity to discard it.

He is not proposing that the power of undo be taken away, only that infinite undo power should replace the save dialog. Were it not for the fact that the save dialog is already dug in in tradition, and the fact that infinite multiple undo capability is difficult for a developer to implement, I would agree with him.