I sincerely apologize for not mentioning this to you sooner, but I've been busy.

Your "Internet Explorer," which is so tightly intertwined with your operating system, just took sixty seconds to launch, when I clicked on a URL in a Microsoft Outlook email message, and it locked up my PC completely.

With over 1 GHz of CPU clock speed, 512 MB of RAM and upwards of 120 GB of disk, my PC often reports itself to be "Out of System Resources."

I know that what that really means, is that I've been so foolish as to open and close various applications during the time my PC has been turned on, and, as a result, some of the RAM memory locations are in conflict because they have not been "let go of" when the applications closed. Most of the applications are yours, Bill, so it puzzles me as to why these apps don't know how to release main memory so that other applications [of yours] may run.

About twenty years ago, I met a guy who had a Ph.D. in computer science, I believe, with a specialization in "garbage collection."

After I stopped laughing at the "title," he explained that it was imperative in serious computing environments, like mainframe computing, to clean up the garbage left in main memory [RAM] when applications were started and stopped; opened and closed.

This guy, at the Ph.D. level, knew about the stuff that apparently nobody on any of your teams knows about or cares about.

You and everyone in your company, should hang your heads in shame. Problems that have been known and solved decades ago still plague your operating systems. Obviously, you don't care, or these issues would have been fixed back in Win 3.1 days, but the shame should still weigh upon your collective heads.

Problems that annoy your customers on a daily basis, and could have been solved, have not been. It just reminds us all that, no matter what the hype and spin may say, Windows is still an "amateur" operating system, and until all versions of your OSs have been repaired to fix this problem, as well as many others, none of you should go around masquerading as professionals.

Your marketing folks tout how well your Operating Systems and Application products work together, yet I am, again, puzzled...

In some applications, [ctrl-tab] switches windows when multiple files have been opened by one application. In others, it doesn't.

Why?, or should I ask, why not? Please explain this "feature" of product-difference to me?

Ooops, sorry... I apologize.... This problem has been alleviated with Windows XP. Thanks.