I'd rather agree with your complaint, smithany. The behaviour may cause some trouble.   You may want to report it on Uservoice as an unexpected behaviour. ... View more

In the General Preferences you can disable "Show Rich Tool Tips". ... View more

I'm afraid you are confusing some things, Abhishek.   - The "Apply" (Drop Shadow) command at the top of the Effect menu is a varying quick access command to immediately apply the last used effect with exactly the same last used settings.   - The "Drop Shadow ..." command below the "Apply" command also remembers the last used settings, but it additionaly opens the modal dialog of the corresponding effect (in case the user wants to set some different parameters).   - The Effect menu > Stylize > Drop Shadow ... command basically opens the Drop Shadow modal dialog with the default settings.   By the way, the Drop Shadow effect is always a raster effect, unless you set the Blur to 0 (zero). ... View more

They are probably not global / spot colour swatches. ... View more

Another reason why Smart Guides may fail could be that your strokes are set to Butt Caps in the Stroke panel. In that case using Projecting Caps is more promising when you try to align precisely.   If you have to use Butt Caps you can also use the Align panel while the "Use Preview Bounds" option is turned on in the flyout menu of the Align panel. ... View more

You can see it in the Transform panel or in the Info panel if you make sure that your lines start at x:0 px / y:0 px   Apart from that, you may consider to create your grids with the Rectangular Grid tool. ... View more