Annoying Window Focus

Am I alone in hating the way Windows 7 handles windows focus? I guess in a way it's good that a dialogue doesn't pop up in the middle of typing or clicking, resulting in an unintended answer to the dialogue, but too often I find myself missing new windows.

Say for example a website has a feature that pops up a new window at a certain time. If your browser isn't the application with focus, you may never see this popup. Or when installing an application, sometimes you won't see that the installer is waiting for user interaction.

Is there any way to change the behavior of what windows take focus?

Well I know for me at least the new window shows up in the task bar and flashes that orangey yellow color. Never really had a problem noticing it. As far as changing a setting, I'm not sure if there is one though there might be a reg hack or something.

Yeah, I get the flashing taskbar button as well, but sometimes it goes unnoticed. Guess I just need to pay more attention.

I am hating this "feature". Any new window that appears, does so behind the window in focus. Sometimes this causes problems, especially involving save or open dialogs and installation dialog windows. Sometimes the application that launches the dialog is stuck in focus, and I can't even get to the dialog (you know, it does that flashing thing when you click on the minimize button), causing me to have to open task manager to end the task or change windows focus.

Even worse, it happened while I was installing office 2007: it was doing the usual things during installation, the first being that it unpacks files to a temp directory, then starts the installation dialog. Well, I was waiting and waiting for that dialog, and everything had become unresponsive, so I did the ctrl-alt-del to launch task manager and see what was going on, and only then did the UAC prompt asking to confirm changes to the computer appear (with the screen darkening and everything). This window focus behavior is driving me crazy... does anyone know how to change any settings for it?