Yes, there is a cleaner and even easier way of disabling the super annoying caps in VS2012:
Open regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General and add a new DWORD (32bit) Value, name it SuppressUppercaseConversion and give it the value 1, restart VS, done.
I am still looking for a similar way for Office. According to MSFT there is no registry key for office though. I don't like the hacky and incomplete "rename your tabs" way. It still leaves the FILE and all the status bar text upper case converted. There must be some way of hacking the exe files to disable uppercase conversion.