I too run many versions of IDE: VC6, VS 2013, and VS 2017. Would love to eliminate VC6. It is tricky to install under Windows 10 (See: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1191047/Install-Visual-Studio-on-Windows). The VC6 debugger is also an issue under Windows-10. Unfortunately, the project won't compile on newer versions. It includes a Microsoft module that is now obsolete and unsupported.

Yes. The auto-formatting is annoying. Gets it wrong too often. Would be better to disable it completely.

The 8 space tab was around long before UNIX. Manual typewriters had a tab key. It was a means to quickly jump across the page and to line up columns. So for a manual typewriter, the 8 space tab made more sense than a 4 space one. Today, it is like using the floppy icon for the save function. Historically it makes sense, but it is rather obsolete.

Old programs work better if NOT installed under C:\Program Files (x86).

Since colonial times... Interesting. The Declaration of Independence is month day year, but I think Lincoln used day month year. But he also used four score and seven years ago, which is confusing to everyone today. My theory has always been that it was the IRS in early 1900s using month day year that forced U.S. to "standardize" on the wacky date format.

This has been a problem for over a decade. I particularly see it with networked drives. If I have the same file on a local drive and on a networked drive, the file timestamps are off by one hour for 6 months of the year. File timestamps should only be valid in GMT. Let the final software call an OS function to convert it to local time just before displaying the file time. It's when the OS tries to be too smart that the problem arises. Some BIOS can automatically adjust for DST. But so can the OS. I believe the problem is when one drive is already automatically adjusted, but another drive is not. As in local drive versus networked drive.

What if you have an LED bulb in in the attic?

Seems to me that worst is being interpreted as either: nonsensical, useless (programmer too lazy to write a meaningful message), or a dreaded message, where something bad really did happen. Here is a nonsensical one: One recent message in my Windows-7 system event log was The service failed to start. Reason: The service finished successfully.