Joel Spolsky has an interesting essay up on his site entitled Choices = Headaches, which explores the myriad options available in Windows Vista for…leaving your computer:

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I'm guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I'm not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

What’s funny is that you can also consume approximately the same set of options by either pressing Win+L (Lock) or Ctrl+Alt+Del and choosing either Lock this computer or the big honkin’ red Shut down splitbutton at the bottom right side of the screen.

Joel, being Mr. Negativity, skips over one big improvement made to the shutdown process in Windows Vista: you no longer have to choose Start in order to shut down, which has made me (and undoubtedly thousands of tech support workers) very happy.