Ross,
I know some other responses point out that browsers are giving issues with the copy/paste function, but I personally resolved the issue 100% when I got my new keyboard. Don't ask me how it resolved the mouse click menu copy function, but it fixed that too. Maybe it's because I got a keyboard that has software that can change the USB polling rate to 1000 times per second instead of the standard of 125, (kinda like my mouse) and it affects how Windows interacts with everything, I don't know.
As for your final questions, I personally really loved the Vista default look in transparent black/grey. (apart from some slightly too low contrast text, but you could change that quite easily with utilities built into Windows at the time) I loathe the push towards a flat UI like they did in 10. (3D is far superior, as our brains were designed to operate in that environment) Physical buttons for this are always going to be far more natural as well, and I really like the idea of the nested icon wheel coming up on the desktop. It's like the weapon/item wheel that you'll see in a lot of modern shooter games.
We do need the ability to have the "helicopter" style GUI system though, as it can be incredibly useful, and is definitely not a problem for the majority of people, and for most twitch-shooter gamers, it's not difficult to get those "headshots" on those smaller icons/checkboxes when doing faster movements. (something I find remarkably easy to do the vast majority of the time considering how many typos I need to fix when typing)