Balloons

A thing I find very useful in windowing operating systems is a 'notification' area, which shows you things that you may want to see, but aren't as important as to bother you immediately. It should be a place to display a few lines of text with (possibly) a nice icon somewhere out of the way.
In Windows 2000 and forward, this has been solved with the so-called 'balloon' pop-ups. You have probably noticed them in the past. They say such interesting things as "Local area connection is now connected" or "No wireless networks found" and, my personal favourite, "Updates are ready for download."

All this is just fine and dandy, were there a few less annoying design flaws.
Let me list them in no particular order:
1. Any program may use the balloon pop-ups, with a few restrictions. The main restriction I have in mind is the 30 second timeout. The program is required to remove the balloon in 30 seconds or sooner, otherwise it will be removed by windows.
Why don't some Windows programs and servies adhere to that time limit?
I have a DSL net access at home which disconnects and reconnects once every 24 hours to reset the router. When that happens, I see the balloon for "Local area network : Cable unplugged" and a minute later "... is now connected." Great. But that last little pop-up doesn't go away. Ever. At least on my windows XP SP1 machine. I woke up one morning to see that friendly balloon and thought to myself: "Well, whatddya know, it just reconnected. Great!" Only to discover when checking my own statement that the line had been connected for over seven hours! Which, incidentally, means that the balloon was on the screen for that long. Now imagine what it's like when this happens while you're working.
You will need to stop typing, take the mouse and close the balloon, otherwise it will keep hanging there and disturbing you, catching attention and all in all mocking you.

2. Have you seen balloons such as: "See the Windows XP tour!" or "You firewall may be out of date!" and, of course, the "Click here to clean up your desktop"? Not to forget the infamous "Hard disk space is low on drive C:"
When I said 'notifications' above, I meant relatively important stuff which (preferably) doesn't happen very often. And even if the balloon does appear, I may wish to acknowledge it and think about it later, not have it pop up again with the same message about 15 seconds later. There should be a sort of filter to select which messages are displayed and which aren't.

3. No offense to 'bright' people, but the yellow in the balloon hurts my eyes, especially in the middle of the night, when I work with all screens dimmed down as low as they would go. There should be a way to change the colors of the balloons, their duration, position and size. Why isn't there? Not all people like the defaults, you know?

4. Why do the balloons queue up while my computer had been in stand-by or hibernation? (I know they don't actually queue up, but rather all the timers expire instantly when Windows wakes up.) Usually, when I start my computer I would like to begin working on what I had in mind, instead of the following procedure:
Click start, close the balloon about security center. Click start again, point to All Programs, close the balloon again. Click start, point to All Programs, start Mozilla Thunderbird, close the balloon about "Windows XP Tour". Click one of the new mails, begin reading, close the "Low disk space balloon". Begin reading again, close the "Clean up Destop" balloon. Ignore the "New updates are ready" balloon, click "Reply to Sender", close the "Updates balloon", see that the focus is in the "new message" window, start typing to the chorus of Windows XP alert 'dings', as focus really wasn't there. (See my post on input focus for details about this one.)... etc

The account is slightly exaggerated, but certainly possible if you have a messy computer. I _DO NOT_ wish to keep closing balloons for the first five or ten minutes while I work.

Luckily, here is a solution:
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1. Click Start, then Run, type in "regedit" and press enter.
2. Find the key "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows
\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced" in the structure.
3. Right click the empty space on the right side of the screen and create a new value of type "String".
4. Name the value "EnableBalloonTips" (no quotes).
5. Double click the new value and type in 'NO' (no quotes).
6. Close the registry editor and live a life free from balloon tips.