Updated: September 21, 2012
One way to ease the pain of moronity inflicted upon you by not being able to remove the tiled, Metro start menu on Windows 8 is by not using Windows 8. Another is, if you must stick with this failure operating system, to use the Skip Metro Suite.
This nifty little tool aims to the bridge the immense gulf between your ability to completely disable Metro, as it was in the Developer Preview, and your total lack of such ability starting with the Customer Preview and carrying on into the RTM edition. It will not make Metro go away; it will merely skip the loading of the Metro crap into your desktop. But hit the Super key, and it's there, to insult your intelligence. Let's see what Skip Metro Suite does.
Overview
There isn't that much to say. Grab the program from the link above, install it, launch it. The program has a single window with four options, two of which are disabled if the fourth one is selected. It allows you to get rid of the nonsense like the Charms, Switcher, Hot Corner, and most importantly, lets you automatically login into your classic desktop.
Activate, reboot, check. Better than nothing, but remember, the Metro devil lurks there, waiting for you. So it's not a complete solution, but it's definitely better than nothing, at least as a stopgap measure until someone hacks a proper tool that will purge Metro and make Windows 8 re-enter the list of potential candidates for desktop use.
Conclusion
All right, so kudos to whoever put Skip Metro Suite together. This is a first step in the right direction. Would it not be funny if every single Windows 8 user simply refused to run Metro, that would be one colossal forever alone. Definitely a positive development.
Now, there's one more thing I must check, and that's the Classic Shell. It worked fine on Windows 7, and now, there are rumors that it is working on Windows 8, too. Well, I will sure explore this and report back. Perhaps, with the combination of the two, the Classic Shell plus Skip Metro Suite, people can compromise enough to enjoy themselves.
Why would they do that? Well, because computer nerds are masochists by nature. We do it all the time. Look at Firefox landing all their crap on us, and we put up with that and add new extensions and make about:config changes to restore old behavior. That's human nature for you. We will talk more about this, too. For now, enjoy Skip Metro Suite.
Cheers.