is your Vista disc an actual Vista disc? Mine still has System recovery options; it's far better then that offered by XP, actually. Although I do sort of prefer the recovery console, makes me feel smart. heh.
Personally I had updated to IE8 using windows update, but found that it broke my winamp lyrics plugin, so I uninstalled it- went along without incident, fortunately.
I haven't used Internet Explorer in ages for browsing; since IE6, in fact. I found it was the main vector that I kept getting infected with, and since switching to firefox have only had one infection that really affected me.
Does your computer only have problems running IE8? I was under the impression that FF was also experiencing symptoms as with the rest of the system (firefox works 98% of the time, should be 100%!
). My recommendation, since I'm not 100% sure exactly what is going on, is that the next time your working with a clean install is to review each update, MS likes to try to force Internet Explorer and a few other programs because they've made the case that they are "part of the operating system". In reality, IE includes a few components that upgrade the windows versions, IE could easily make an update that includes those updated Libraries but that would mean everybody won't get IE.
Microsoft Certainly makes a good number of good programs, such as office, and Visual studio, and so on; their paid offerings are for the most part of much higher quality then what they offer for free, but what they offer for free is by no means trash; personally, I don't like IE; but some of it's version releases broke new ground with windows itself; perhaps only conceptually the whole idea of ActiveX controls, while horrible as a web-based technology, is extremely useful and powerful when developing applications.
I guess MS kind of lost interest when Netscape no longer offered much competition; and then they gave too little too late to prevent Firefox from becoming a powerful adversary.
of course Allan disagrees with me on many points here but I do hope that he can understand my position since I'm not really bashing IE itself but rather logically concluding that while it posessed a lot of potential MS kind of let it sit on IE6 for a bit too long.
