The thing I most remember is the surprise of intransitive collation order. I also recall implementing case insensitive lookup.

It might have been an early version of this one: http://codecentral.embarcadero.com/Item/15171 - from 2001 - but I've written quite a few hash tables over the years, and may be blending the different recollections. I never used Vista, and I'm pretty sure my experience predated Windows 7.

I also wrote JclStrHashMap to support JclExprEval: https://github.com/project-jedi/jcl/blob/master/jcl/source/c...

I also wrote the Delphi runtime library TDictionary generic implementation, but that was more recent.

Update I found it: original discussion, from newsgroups, has been ported to the web: http://www.delphigroups.info/2/62/478610.html

It was from 2004, so more like 15 years ago. It's mildly painful to read myself from back then too :)