I can confirm that the taskbar behaviour 4wd asked about works fine on my install (Win 7 64-bit). I tried it in every position (ie bottom, top, left and right of the desktop) and all menus opened where they were clicked.
As for the other comments - I've never had either Vista or Win7 reboot my computer after Windows Update. I do get pop ups warning me that I need to reboot, but that's it. If I am not around for the warnings, the power button on the start menu switches to "Install updates and shutdown". File transfers/copying speed is fine on my notebook (although I use DOpus 9 and TeraCopy, so perhaps I'm simply not seeing the behaviour).
NB I just tried using two instances of Windows Explorer with TeraCopy disabled and moved a 50MB file from E:\ to my desktop (on C:\) in less than a second.