I'm really puzzled about how Quicktime could expose a RAID driver bug as well. Those are two things that should be far removed from ever caring about each other in a system. Same for readyboost. How is that causing problems for Quicktime? Do the Win32 APIs really allow a user level program to go that deep and cause damage?

It is a shame that when apps leave their native platform, they degrade so much. Quicktime for Windows has never been great, while the flipside was also true. Windows Media Player for the Mac was painfully our of it's native environment, and was generally not updated often. Microsoft finally killed it off in favor of pointing people to a 3rd party component that adds their proprietary media formats into the Quicktime layer of the system. Now if Apple would do the same, and just code their stuff to work as a Windows codec, things would be simpler.