You can adjust what the power button should do if it is pressed (Energy Options -> Change plan settings -> Change advanced power settings -> Power buttons and lid -> there you go), I suppose in your configuration it's set to "do nothing".
anyone know if I can turn on an option that allows me to have shortcuts on my "power bar" to the left hand side as on the previous windows xp/ vista etc?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975784 This should get you going.
It good but don't run it with bootcamp... It crashes when I try to read the mac partition. And yes it still gets viruses