Daniel Pistelli, the man behind NTCore.com, recently released an extremely useful Windows Vista management tool. If the following applies for you as well you should give it a go [download].

Vista4Experts is kind of a treat for computer experts who don’t want security center notifications, User Account Control dialogs, automatic Windows Defender scannings, automatic update installations (which cause you to reboot your system if you don’t react quickly enough). People who want MSDN (or google) set as default search engine in the Internet Explorer search bar, who want the start menu power button to shut down the system instead of hibernating it, etc. These and many more fixes are included in Vista4Experts. All of these changes can be discarded, enabled or reversed. Vista4Experts is the first expert utility of its kind and works on every platform.

It may reduce the security level of your Vista installation, but if you know what you are doing you will finally escape from all those annoying security alert boxes. Besides other applications probably keep the security (AV, Firewall, etc.). Best of all, it’s FREE (and comes with the standard “avoid lawsuit disclaimer”).