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The new one has a setting that boots to desktop, if that helps any.

That's a shame, the start screen is very useful place to organize shortcuts to your most often used tasks. I use oblytile to generate custom shortcuts and I have (organized by location / purpose) 12 shortcuts to start a ssh/rdp session to a remote server. It also has shortcuts to spotify/outlook/xencenter/vsphere and gmail.

But that is just your Start menu expanded to take the whole screen... Were you removing all the items from Start menu on older versions of Windows as well?