Did you know Microsoft built a Mimesweeper game, in which the goal was to blow up annoying mimes — but at the last minute decided to leave the game out of Vista? There’s more weird facts like that in the Microsoft shell blog entry Features that didn’t make the cut.

Like more than a few people, I would have jumped at the chance to blow up a few mimes. But the blog contends that some people actually like the blandly offensive “entertainers.” It notes wryly, “Apparently there are many countries where running into a mime is common occurrence and not something to make light of in a video game.”

Some serious features were left out as well, for example, the Safe Delete button that would “instantly delete all of the files shown in the (Explorer) window permanently from the system.” Why that’s a “safe” delete, I’m not sure; seems pretty unsafe to me. In any event, user testing showed that feature to be a loser, so it was pulled.

Check out the blog for other interesting tidbits, and the reasoning behind them.

And post any comments here as to what features you wish Microsoft would have liked included in Vista — and which it should have left out.