I can totally see Internet availabilit correlating with the rise of unwanted stuff in the install. Believe it started with 3rd party games being part of the OS at first. I don't recall the yes/maybe later dialog "options" in win8 though, at least not in the beginning.

I actually really liked the win8 start menu change and the live tiles, even wrote some tiny homegrown apps with them. My logic was always "if I am opening the start menu, I will want to interact with that menu and only it until it's closed", so having it fullscreen made sense.