Re:solving the problem, slashdot style (Score 1)

This is just in response to your comment:

"Are you proposing that Microsoft has a "black ops" department, whose sole purpose is to cause Windows to behave incorrectly when 3rd party software is run?"

Now I'm not saying that this is occurring with Firefox, but I feel it's worth pointing out that Microsoft has done shady things on at least two major occasions:

1) Back when there was an alternative to MS-DOS (DR-DOS), Windows spat out bogus errors to make it looke like DR-DOS was incompatible with Windows.

2) Microsoft's infamous 10 incoming connections limit that was introduced in Windows NT 4.0 to kill competing web servers which ran on Professional. Microsoft wanted to force people to purchase Server just to run apache. It was later shown that Professional and Server contained the same executable code and that a collection of registry changes distinguished the products.