Haven't you guys ever programmed for PC's? Bad enough the resource hog/system spy Steam is required but you also don't seem to quite grasp the whole windowed environment concept. Where you can swap windows to do other tasks while others keep running? I realize you are probably used to inflexible one thing at a time consoles but if you do attempt a PC prot it would be a great advantage to take advantage of the possiblities there. Also locking the mouse seems to slow responce and makes turning a real chore. Are you working on the UI at least to try to make it more friendly?

Oh, and I really really hate having to sign-in to "Live" to play. It is not anyone else's business if i am playing a particular game or not.

You could swap out in Morrowind.
My Oblivion for PC was scratched so I could never find out.
But as for Skyrim, this really annoys me.

You can alt-tab out to Windows and do other stuff all you want, if that's what you are talking about (sorry if I misunderstood what you meant). You just need to remember to keep a different tab active before you start Skyrim (like the Task Manager). This is with 1.0~1.3. Don't know if it's fixed for 1.4.

They don't need to rehaul the UI. There's already good community mod solutions for the UI.

Yeah, they should have had something better on release, but that's what happens when you commit to a release date. You get a rush job.

2 points,
A) yes you CAn alt-tab out but when you try to re-enter the game it (Skyrim) freezes the PC. and you have to do a hard shut-down then re-start. not good at all

depending on the community to fix their game may be a good way to go cheap on labor but not very good customer relations since I don't know who wrote those mods or what will be "delivered" along with the mod. So any virus included is not just the fault of who wrote the mod but also Bethesda's since that is their business model.

the really sad part is the game has so many interesting things going on with it and has so much potential it just makes me mad how they failed on the UI.

This is untrue from my experience. It will give a black screen yes, but I always just Alt-Tab again, (Or I usually Windows Key-Tab) and it will bring the game up again.

This is a same for me. Alt+Tab or just clicking the skyrim icon on my desktop bar gets me a black, blank window, but Alt+Tabbing again gets me back into the game.

Alt+Tab works fine for me. When I switch back to Skyrim, it's just a black screen, but you just have to Alt+Tab away and back once more and the Skyrim window loads properly