said by Paul Thurrott on October 23rd :

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I've found out that the source of Allchin's concerns was an unexpectedly buggy pre-RTM build of Vista. The previous Friday, Microsoft pushed Vista build 5824 into escrow, hoping that the build could qualify as the final shipping version. But a catastrophic problem with the build destroyed any systems that upgraded from Windows XP, requiring complete reinstallations. After several frantic days of trying to find the bug, Microsoft finally fixed the problem last Friday and reset escrow. On Friday, Microsoft internally released build 5840, which didn't include the bug. Testing over the weekend produced positive feedback.

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said by Name Game :

Since the train pulls out of the station on the 25th OCT..

"An Oct. 25 RTM date would give computer manufacturers enough time to get new machines loaded with Vista into store inventories for an early January launch, which could still catch some momentum at the tail end of the holidays," said Joe Wilcox, an analyst with Jupiter Research.

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Allen said the Vista team discovered the bug, which "would totally crash the system, requiring a complete reinstall," in Vista Build 5824 on Oct. 13. The team fixed the bug a week later in Vista Build 5840, he said, but the delivery of the operating system to PC makers was delayed.

The team is now targeting a new date of Nov. 8 for Vista's release to manufacturing, Allen said. He also said that the business release of Vista, which Microsoft recently said is on track for release next month, "will barely make the end of November deadline."

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To add, Explorer is a shell for the user, not Win32 (or the user mode side of NTDLL, for that matter). The USER and GDI calls don't require Explorer...in fact, they still work after killing off most of the user mode paraphernalia.

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said by garywk :

Notice what will now be off-limits for IE to write to under Protected Mode. That means the file system and the registry, both areas of which operate at kernel mode, are currently areas which IE has the ability to write to directly. Whether or not IE runs during kernel mode when performing these actions I cannot say for sure, but MS documentation says some of their applications switch between kernel mode and user mode.

said by garywk :

Since this is the introduction of the "defense in depth" security model for IE it is also an admission from MS that IE was previously in violation of the principle of "defense in depth". That tells me two things. One. IE currently has low level system access, and, two, that IE's current security model is "insecurity by design".

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...in information security defence in depth represents the use of multiple computer security techniques to help mitigate the risk of one component of the defence being compromised or circumvented.

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Internet-facing applications such as browsers are inherently at a higher security risk than other applications because they can download untrustworthy content from unknown sources. IE7’s Protected Mode leverage's Windows Vista’s UAC, MIC and UIPI features to boost browser security. In IE7’s Protected Mode—which is the default in other than the Trusted security zone—the IE process runs with Low rights, even if the logged-in user is an administrator. Since add-ins to IE such as ActiveX controls and toolbars run within the IE process, those add-ins run Low as well. The idea behind Protected Mode IE is that even if an attacker somehow defeated every defense mechanism and gained control of the IE process and got it to run some arbitrary code, that code would be severely limited in what it could do. Almost all of the file system and registry would be off-limits to it for writing, reducing the ability of an exploit to modify the system or harm user files. The code wouldn't have enough privileges to install software, put files in the user's Startup folder, hijack browser settings, or other nastiness.

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Good suggestions there, by the way. Do you think the average Windows user would be able to live with those? Do you think Joe Average would be able to manually change NTFS permissions for every damn executable he encounters?

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Hmmm.... IOW's, you're saying trust the authors of what has been the most insecure OS for last 20 years or so for computer security? What makes you think that MS is really interested in changing the status quo? They've had decades to improve the security of their systems and have shown, imo, little, if any, interest in really securing it.

They could have done things such as change default permissions so that no executable could run unless given explicit execute permissions, and stopped all emailed .exes from executing by default, but they didn't.

They could have removed IE's hooks from the system but they haven't. Doing that would have shown the hypocrisy of their claims that IE had to be hooked into the system.

They could have led the way to getting rid of ActiveX as a way of compromising systems by getting rid of ActiveX on their own websites, but they didn't. Even when they released work-arounds for ActiveX problems that included blocking ActiveX in IE they left ActiveX content in all their own websites. Wow! A company that tells you don't use this feature, it's insecure, forces users to use it or their own sites won't display properly.

So much for any real committment to security by the authors of that OS.

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Only a fool would trust his security to MS. But a smart man would trust his security to the author of the operating system (in this case, that would be MS) and more importantly himself. Only a fool would trust an anti-malware company in anything. Anti-malware companies are the last people on earth that would want to see all malware issues disappear. Their livelihood depends on crapware. What makes you think they want the problem to go away? They obviously don't, unless they also want to go out of business.

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For years they had been trashing every OS Microsoft put out

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