Pretty much throughout the endeavor of reviewing this crappy OS it popped up messages like this, telling me that certain things I don't care about have been disabled. This gets incredibly irritating after a while and is something that should not be done. Pop it up ONCE!

Another thing it complained about was the lack of any "media"

Uh, what? What kind of media? A CD-ROM? I already installed this stupid OS!
I realized later on that it wanted software sources for the system updater. This is something that should be done automatically by the operating system, and should require no user intervention. And you could have said "software sources" instead of "media", since media implies either physical copies of software on disc, or something like CBC.

Since Mandriva can't tell that I didn't enter a root password during setup I can't open the real control panel. Gee, thanks Mandriva!
The control panel I can open doesn't provide a great number of options for anything.

Here we go again with that non-conforming to themes BS. This is 2011 now, not 1981, come on.

The only positive I can see here is the presence of some pretty cool screensavers!