Since its inception in Windows 95, I’ve always been a fan of the Run command. I was never big on making a huge taskbar nor loading my desktop full of shortcuts. The Run command allowed me to quickly access applications or documents in which the path was known (ie. the calculator or command prompt).
I was a fortunate soul to never have the discomfort in using Windows Vista, but from what I understand it is a very unpleasant experience. Having said that, there were some changes in the GUI coming from Windows XP to Windows 7. The toolbar changed in Windows Explorer. My personal preference while browsing through my files is to have everything in Details mode and show file extensions.