I took a phone call halfway through my post, and didn't realise that difarn had already said much the same thing. Her method might be preferable if you're not keen on dabbling in the registry.

"by whom."

By many people - me included. Your inference that we're all sycophants and that us "Journos" are bribed to say good things about products is very silly. Think about it for a nanosecond (which you obviously didn't) and you understand why.

It doesn't matter how good your personal filing system is you'll be unlikely to have one that's as efficient and easy to manage as the library system. The whole point about libraries is the way that they enable you to rapidly track files that are in various locations, saving time on drilling down through various folders.

I have tens of thousands of document files, over thirteen thousand images, and huge numbers of email files stored on my machines, and libraries makes short work of locating any one of them. You may not like the idea, and that's your decision of course, but dismissing something out of hand without giving it a fair trial seems a bit daft to me.

That said, you can easily disable the library feature - just follow the advice we've provided.