bitman
It seems like even the brassiest brass should be doing one day a week manning the TS phones as that would be better than nothing. I mean devs and everybody.
That was a suggestion I made as well (I even offered to help), but unfortunately most of the current backlog does not deal with technical questions but things like registration issues, trying to recover a forgotten email under which someone already registered, questions about eligibility for lifetime updates, will the Mac alpha be free to existing users or everyone, etc. Dealing with these, and the protocol for dealing with the support queue, is a different skill set compared to answering technical questions. Perhaps that's why the devs have been spending more time addressing questions being posed in the forums.
As to the control bar, I assume this happens only if you're trying to float it? It's possible this is a bug and there may not be a solution at the moment. Regardless, that doesn't excuse not sending a message saying "We've reproduced this and it's a bug" but I do realize that if a support person has to choose between a response to a customer who can't register the software they've paid for vs. telling someone there's no solution to their issue, they're going to choose the former.