It still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache".
What exactly is VLC doing when it does this?

VLC Media Player is a self-contained media player program that will play almost anything you throw at it, and works independently of any codecs installed on your system. So even if your codec installations get messed up, VLC still works.
It also plays DVDs.

Does this mean that all antivirus makers must start doing sanity checks before releasing definition updates to the public? For example, there was once a definition update for an antivirus program that deleted some critical system file in Windows. Running a scan against a set of known clean Windows files and other popular programs should always be done before a release. Same idea for popular websites.

I only use Mint as a live CD (USB flash drive actually). Since you can't use MATE on a live CD, that's a deal breaker.

That never happened.

Someone guessed Sarah Palin's security questions (such as "Where did you first meet your spouse" with the answer of her high school in Alaska), and got into the account. Then the password was changed to popcorn.

Yeah, when you're writing Assembly, it's still assembly. Using lisp to make macros doesn't change the langauge.

The "Torbrowser" package from eff.org I mentioned does not manually require starting Tor, you just run something called "Start Tor Browser.exe", and it does everything for you, you just run it and start browsing. No need to "Start up tor", or "manually turn on" anything. It's a separate profile from your main Firefox profile.
But it doesn't auto-update. Some people think that's a privacy risk, so they exclude those kind of features.

Vidalia still starts up in the background, but it shuts down when you close the browser.

Tried "Torbrowser"? It's a pack that lets you run a "Portable App" preconfigured custom build of Firefox Aurora 9, which automatically logs you into Tor before you use the browser. Really easy to use.

I've seen that page many times already. Maybe the complaints were valid for an earlier version of the browser, but Iron is different enough than stock Chromium now. It leaves out the part about Iron successfully implementing adblock.ini. While there are other extensions for blocking ads, you're left with trying to find out which extension is the real one which stops them from loading, and not just an element hider. Then there are performance problems with some of the extensions, they simply can't handle a large database of websites. Adblock.ini just works, even if you need to add an element hider on top of that for best results.

Also, why is a fork or alternative build of an open-source program automatically a scam? Is Palemoon a scam?

That said, I don't really use Chromium/Iron that much.
I was having problems when lots of tabs were open. Some tabs would become unresponsive to scrolling or clicks, but would still display when the tab had become the selected tab. You'd need to wait about 10 seconds for the tab to be able to scroll and click on links. Firefox doesn't develop this kind of problem, so I stick with Firefox. Yes, I know that Chromium downright smokes Firefox in a few rendering performance tests (Try the "Katamari" bookmarklet for example), but Firefox doesn't have unresponsive zombie tabs.

The real reason to use SRWare Iron is so you can use Fanboy's adblock.ini file to stop the browser from loading ads. Then you can combine that with an additional element hider.