I find myself helping people with problems where a 3rd party application or subsystem (e.g., security suite) has mucked up Windows 7.Just a general observation: Windows 7 seems to be particularly vulnerable to being "corrupted" as a result of the installation of stuff that was designed/developed for Vista and earlier. There is, of course, plenty of brand new and slightly buggy software, but it seems eclipsed by the problems being caused by Shell Extensions, IE Add-ons, application suites, handy tools, etc. that people are either getting online or carrying forward from their older systems.Consider that no knowledgeable person here would advise someone to install Windows 7 as an upgrade to Vista. It almost never works well. Less well, IMO, than prior upgrades (acknowledging that clean installs have always been superior).You can't blame people for wanting that old tool or feature they always used, and for trying to reinstall the software to enable it. And you CERTAINLY can't blame them for visiting web sites that install Add-ons that are either somewhat or completely incompatible with Windows 7, since Internet Explorer is set by default to install pretty much anything and everything...I'm sometimes irritated when I see people blame Microsoft for the problems their mishmash of incompatible software has caused, but I'm starting to come around to that kind of thinking... Windows 7 is a very nice, very powerful system, but it simply doesn't seem to be very defensive.Your thoughts on this?-Noel

Thanks for moving the thread, Carey, though the vulnerability I speak of is less "security" and more "defensive programming" oriented.Put another way, an older program that's fundamentally incompatible with Windows 7 to the degree that it causes a crash or failure, but which isn't blocked from causing that crash isn't so much a security risk as a stability risk.If Windows were perfectly defensive, we'd hear a lot less "Microsoft, are you going to fix this?" and wouldn't have to tell people to "Disable your Add-ons and Shell Extensions" nearly so often.-Noel