I find that disturbing, one of the first things I do after a clean install of windows is to check the "Show Hidden Files", which was hard to find in Windows 7 :/ I thought most tech savvie people did that?

I wonder why you say it was hard to find - it's always been under the View tab in Folder Options.

Maybe because of the Control Panel revamp, or the fact that the menu-bar is hidden by default in Explorer windows?

I've been using Windows 7 at work for about a year, and I had absolutely no idea that the menu will show up when I hit the alt key until exactly 2 days ago. Every time I needed something from it I'd just rummage around all the visible menus, not find it, curse my head off and open up the command prompt.

I'm not sure which will look dumber as a consequence of this post: me or the Windows 7 UI.

Don't feel too bad. I've been using Windows 7 since shortly after it came out and I had no idea until I just read your post.

It's due to the hidden menu, same drill with Office 2010 and finding "Save As.." etc, I've never been much for just using the keyboard, I like using the mouse to navigate the menus ;)

I don't. I generally leave that off, especially on my mac. If I want to see hidden files, I launch a terminal and list all files.

How is the real hosts file rendered hidden in Explorer?

Like any other hidden file, it's not rendered until you choose to show hidden files and then at the point, it shows the file, but the icon is semi transparent.

Sorry, I meant how do you make a file hidden?

     attrib +h

at the cmd prompt, the file properties in explorer would have a checkbox for this too