Windows – Why do some menus open to the left of the cursor and others to the right

Have you gone into the Advanced Options in IE? I think the settings you are looking for are just turned off by default for normal users.

I could be mistaken though, I haven't been working with Vista much.

Edit: Let me rephrase: have you double-checked your settings under the limited account. Sometimes in an attempt to be "helpful" I've see where XP (or it might have been the security software) automatically changes some settings in the limited accounts.

I realize that your Admin account would have those on and that you are surely intelligent enough to check it on the Admin account. I was just suggesting that like many others, you might want to re-check the limited account.

MenuStrip uses a custom renderer, it doesn't leave it up to Windows to draw the menu. You can change the RenderMode property to System but that doesn't help, it's a pre-Win7 version of what system-drawn menus looked like. If you want Windows to render the menu then you'll have to fall back to the .NET 1.1 MainMenu component. Another way is to assign the Renderer property to your own custom renderer, not really practical.

This is also an issue with WPF, worse because it renders all the controls itself. We are quickly approaching a stage where the look-and-feel of a program is determined by the UI class library, not the operating system.