Wish I had more time to spend over here too Bill, since few really understand
what happened even though the original cause was all over the technology news
for several weeks.
I agree that in the case of OneCare the communication of the Defender
situation wasn't done properly, probably because both everyone at Microsoft
and even we in the forums had been running this way with the OneCare Beta 1.5
version for weeks before it was released. You tend to forget that there are
others that are either running the 'old' version or none at all, so I suspect
that's what really happened. I also suspect that internally the Vista release
was a factor too, since that occured at about the same time.
However, the interesting part is that the real change occured within Windows
Defender itself, primarily due to requirements, nay 'suggestions' by the
European Commision (EU) and also precipitated by the Symantec/McAfee attacks
here in the US. This change was the added ability to disable Windows
Defender, which hadn't existed before this decision and I believe occured in
the 1593 revision.
This disable function is probably the reason that the 1592 revision is
acting strangely lately and why that same revision creates problems when left
installed with OneCare. As usual, neither you nor we were informed of these
potential issues, so we're having to figure them out for ourselves.
Realize that shortly the other third-party products designed for both Vista
and XP will begin to use this disable ability too, so you're likely to be
hearing a lot about this issue in the future. At least the Vista version
should be stable as long as the user has at least the RC1 version installed.
Bitman
Bill Sanderson MVP said:
That's a fair complaint--all of it. I really wish that the OneCare
management had done some communication around this issue to their
users--both within the program and in their forums.
Everybody here is a volunteer--probably including the Microsoft staff who
occasionally post here--I suspect that now that the product is released,
they have very little time allocated in the budget to reading here.
I do wish we had the time to follow OneCare's forum as well. Stephen Boots
spends some time here and has been very helpful, but I've spent very little
time over there, and mostly visited when I had a clear-cut complaint--such
as OneCare eating a mail store.
One reason we tend to harp on the "Please tell it to the OneCare forums" is
that is the way to get the message directly to the folks in charge of that
program.
Anyway---I'm sorry we weren't clearer about this.
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