[JKT]

That would have been me - I found the translucency of inactive windows useful, not noisy - it gave you that little bit more feedback as to what windows you had open and it was definitely easier to tell which windows were active versus inactive. Though saying that, we didn't have Exposé in those days. If Apple kept the same degree of opaqueness for frontmost windows that it has now and had a low degree of translucency for background windows, that would make it much easier to distinguish active versus inactive than it currently is.

Vista's problem is that MS have gone for a "look at what we can do (now)" approach to the UI as opposed to the correct one of "what actually works and is functional". I can't believe they have made an even bigger error than Apple did with the overkill translucency of their title bars but, hey, that's MS for you - take an idea and make it much worse than it was originally. ;)

P.S. For people having big problems distinguishing active v. inactive in 10.4 - I wonder how many have calibrated their monitor? If the contrast isn't suitable, then it could be because their colour calibration is too washed out.