Don't get me wrong, I love the Zune, but the new interface is beautiful to a fault. Like Beauty and the Geek, it's nice to look at, but you can't really hold a conversation with it. It's like it's always in the bathroom fixing its hair or makeup. I was doing more poking around the Zune files and I found some command-line options to try. The most interesting one disables the DirectX effects and should make the UI a lot snappier for those that just don't have the horsepower or the desire for a really flashy interface. I think I know who you are.

The command-line options I found:

• -animations:(true|false) Enable or disable fading effects.
• -gdi Use GDI instead of DirectX, seems to disable animations and probably give some legacy support. This is mentioned in the Zune 2.3 release notes.
• -switchtogdi Permanently switch to GDI rendering. makes registry entry change in general settings: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Zune\GeneralSettings\UseGDI=1
• -dx9 Use DirectX9 compatibility? Probably.
• -direction:(rtl|ltr) Use Right-to-Left rendering for languages that require it.

So for example, you want to start by disabling the fancy slide and fade animations to see what effect that has. Create a shortcut to the Zune.exe file, edit the properties of the shortcut and add -animations:false to the end of the command line.

That was nice, but you still have some issues, so you want to drop DirectX and go with a straight GDI application. I don't know much about Vista, but I have a nagging thought that Vista did away with GDI, so if you're on Vista, I don't know what will happen. So you create the shortcut and add -gdi to the end of the command line.

You want to mess around with some of the other settings (which I don't really see as valuable)? Go ahead, knock yourself and your computer out.