The Sticky Keys thing is one I've run into by accident, although it was several years back - I think with early (pre-SP1) WinXP. It can be very confusing because Ctl key may be "stuck" and when you hit it again to turn it on you actually turn it off. Other accidental "accessibility settings" like the "Magnifier" etc are usually so bizarre (if you're not using them purpose) that they don't simulate subtle malfunctions. When it happened in WinXP I found a quick answer in a Help file. Knowing what I wanted to look for, it took an hour in Vista; and even then I had to chase a dozen false leads that lead nowhere.

For anything that needs to be "customized" in any Office program, the settings you make in Word are applied to all other Office programs and often carry over to other (non-Office and/or non-Microsoft) programs. (I haven't seen anything about how you would change settings in Excel or Power Point for example if, for some reason, you're using them and don't have Word installed to give you a place to change the settings.)

The accessibility settings are changed in the OS though, so that you have to go to "a different place" to find out about them. The "place" is generally in Control Panel, although Vista doesn't name the place so you can recognize it easily. Vista Help(less) entries sometimes give you a link to take you to a place to do things, but generally don't tell you where the place is so that you can identify it for future use, and when you use a link from Help "the place" may be labelled differently than when you open it using a more direct method, so even "being there" doesn't tell you where the functions are.

Vista help files rely a lot on links to "Training Videos" that all assume that you're a "first time user" and that you are incapable of learning anything and need to start over with the basics. A search for any feature too advanced to have been familiar to the "redesigning waitress" in charge of Vista design is ignored by search, and you're just sent to an "introductory video" again. The Videos of course don't mention "that complicated stuff."

There are no "Microsoft answers" to anything, in Help for Vista or Help for newer Office programs, or even if you search what used to be called the Microsoft Knowledge Base. Instead, you're referred to discussion groups where you have to sort out which SPGWK might actually know something and which ones are telling you to do something that will destroy your system completely. It is obvious that nobody from Microsoft even looks at the misinformation that's posted, since it's easy to find a dozen threads on the same question, none of which give the answer (that can be found in a thread on a different subject) - with many questions several years old with no answer where they were asked.

(We do better here than most of the "official" Microsoft discussion sites.)

Sorry for the rant. There probably are enough "casual users" to keep Microsoft in business and maybe even profitable; but they've destroyed their flagship programs as useful professional level tools.

John