Honestly, I haven't looked into that story very much -- I recall that MS was sued for creating some kind of unfair advantage for MS apps... But what I really remember is third party developers who insisted on installing their shared DLLs in the Windows directory like it was a lucky charm or something, leaving the user with a series of corrupted or mismatched shared libraries. In all, I can't say that I've been terribly impressed with developers -- some of them are very, very good, but the ones who write commercial applications have frequently been technically proficient within their specialty and completely ignorant of elements I'd take for granted. If I had to hire one, I think I'd hand them a box of crap spare parts and an OS CD and tell them to put the thing together, and if they just stared at me I'd kick them back out the door again.

I was up at MS and had a chance to talk to one of the lead developers working on one of their more commonly used libraries and watched him hunt around in various locations for information on a different MS project a while before giving up and emailing a buddy to ask if he knew who was working on it. What would a hive mind need with email?

yep,
I love the idea that developers THINK, they need to store THEIR drivers, dll's, inf's in the windows DIR...AND NOT in their own dir.  Or even a COPY, of the file.
It really makes backing up Progs a PAIN, and makes windows about 2-3 times larger then it needs to be.

Try to backup your programs, without the OS...
Or try backing up windows without the extra crap that was installed..

If you backup your progs without the OS, and/or your OS corrupts, you loose the drivers and the updated drivers that are in Win OS.

Hey, The Register decided to have one of their internal reporters with a MS predisposition to review Vista.
A worthy read.

He labeled his article, A massively multiplayer beta test. His URL made me  .

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/14/pricey_beta_bugger/

There is only one solution for Microsoft and a decent desktop, it's called XP SP3 w/IE7 and dual-direction firewall.

I wont hunt you down but not a windows fan - i am more like a slave