No kidding!

What a ridiculous piece of junk.

Anyhow, wonders never cease. I "fixed" the problem (or so it seems, so far) by installing SP2. So, the people who caused the problem actually fixed it. Amazing. And you thought that Microsoft just made things worse and worse.

Of course, I still have absolutely no idea what was going on.

In the process, I learned about an antispyware tool I hadn't used before: Intermute's Spy Subtract . It's commercial-ware, but with a 30 day trial. It detected a few things (mostly registry keys) that Spybot, Adaware, and HiJack This all missed.

The fact that whole segments of the software industry continue to thrive as a result of extremely poor quality of Microsoft amazes me. If it were *any* other product area, the poor quality source of all the problems would be replaced. Because of 3rd party software, this isn't happening "on the desktop". Instead, people keep bandaging their critically wounded patient.

The internet will kill Microsoft. Not in the way they fear, however. It will be because the globally connected world magnifies the poor quality and reliability of the MS products. They will not be able to fix this without losing their stranglehold on the market -- their 3rd party software dominance. To fix these problems, Microsoft will need an entirely new platform; they can't polish this turd enough. When they do that, they lose the backward compatibility and the development environment investments won't matter because everything will need to be ported.

I can't wait to see Microsoft delisted from Nasdaq.

Jim