Make IE9 look more like IE8

You can make Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) look more like Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) in Windows in a few ways. I was searching for a site to lay this out for me and found suggestions to uninstall IE9 or install a Windows Classic theme to be unhelpful. Here is what you can do:

One of the most apparent changes was that the tabs were moved up and to the left of the new, combined address/search bar (where you type in the websites). The tradeoff is you gain screen real estate but lose space for tabs. To futher gain screen real estate, the status bar (with the zoom icon on the bottom right), the Favorites bar, and the Command bar were removed.

To place the tabs below the address/search bar:
Right-click a tab or an empty area above the address bar and click "Show tabs on a separate row"

To add back the favorites, command, and status bar:
Press Alt to reveal the menu
Click View - Toolbars and click Favorites bar, Command bar, and Status bar

I don't think you can change Internet Explorer if you do not like the new download dialog, manager, the transparency effects, or the new buttons (back, forward, compatibility view, refresh, or stop)

No Repair Install in Windows Vista, Windows 7?

Is there a way to perform a repair installation on Windows Vista or Windows 7? In Windows XP, you could boot from the installation media, press enter to install, accept the license agreement, and press R to repair your installation (some would call this a dirty install or an upgrade install). This option does not appear to exist in Windows Vista and Windows 7. From what I've read, the reason the repair installation option doesn't exist is that Windows Vista and Windows 7 deploy from a Windows Image (install.wim), so now you don't really install Windows, you image Windows down to your computer.

Watching the Windows XP repair process, I notice it deletes files then recopies them. Could you in effect perform a repair install by copying certain files (like the registry files) to another directory, have the Windows install write over them, then copy them back or merge the difference? Has someone created a repair installation tool?

There are some repair tools that can be run in Windows Vista and Windows 7, but they don't appear to be analogous to the repair install. You can boot to the installation media, choose Repair My Computer, pull up a command prompt and type the following commands, but neither the Offline System File Checker nor Startup Repair have fixed the issues I have tried to fix:
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=d: /offwindir=d:\windows
x:\sources\recovery\startrep.exe