(Speaking of menu/drop-downs with underlined characters for alt commands.)

> This works poorly if you intend to localise your application. Great if you don't though.

Sure that's true. But remember M$ allowed you to fairly easily edit those underlined-characters in, oh, for example Office 2002 and 2003. Even if you didn't have a lot of default underlines in your current language settings, it is still possible for someone to add their own underline-shortcuts.

Back in those days, the first thing I did on any personal new install of Outlook, was to disable the shortcut that marked all email as being read. (That's cause I hit that button by accident too many times.)

Windows did both successfully.

It sounds like your complaint might be that it works poorly if you half-ass the localization process and assume that literal translation of strings is most or all of what localization means.