The regularity theory for variational inequalities over polyhedral sets developed in a series of papers by Robinson, Ralph and Dontchev-Rockafellar in the 90s has long become classics of variational analysis. But in the available proofs of almost all main results, fairly nontrivial as they are, techniques of variational analysis do not play a significant part. In the paper we develop a new approach that allows to obtain some generalizations of the the mentioned results without invoking anything beyond elementary geometry of convex polyhedra and some basic facts of the theory of metric regularity.