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For those of you crying foul/pot shot, you didn’t site any specific instances. As someone else asked, are they pot shots or simply points of fact?

My hope is that people on the Window development and decision teams pay attention to the constructive feedback in order to create a better product.

Thanx for the informative article. However it, and the responses, illustrate the reason I (and most users) stay away from Linux by the droves. I don’t want to work with an OS that comes with dozens of different major versions, options and choices. The Linux community has identified the fragmentation of the their OS as a main barrier to its widespread adoption and have often tried to encourage some sort of unification. But their answer seems to be yet more versions, options and choices. Yes Windows is a pain, but a unified, consistent, and supported one.

I haven’t seen dozens of major distros. I believe your point is that people are lazy and want a company to make decisions for them. There are plenty of comparisons on the Web to help one make a decision on which distro will work best for them.

Linux, specifically, is very well supported. It’s supported by a world wide community of developers. Some are volunteering and some are company funded like SUSE and Red Hat. Many or most of the distros are fixing bugs and sending the bug fixes upstream.

As for software to use on and/or support Linux, there are good products and bad products. Some have good support and some have no support. Just like with any OS.

I believe the only reason that Linux desktop editions don’t have more of a presence is because there are no ads for it on TV. I don’t believe it has anything to do with security or functionality any longer. My evidence is the difference in presence between OS X and any other Linux distribution and Windows to any Linux distribution. It all seems to center around how much money is spent on advertising.

OpenSuse wasn’t mentioned but is a good distro with a balance between stability and new technologies with a focus on openness. For comparison, Ubuntu is usually further behind on technologies and is moving in their own direction with regards to being more proprietary. BTW, Last I heard, Microsoft invests in Ubuntu.

”rather, the most certain way to judge the effectiveness of security features in software is to let a bunch of software engineers poke through the code.” But how do I know the software hasn’t been poked at by a bunch of hackers from China or Romania??

Linux security certainly has been poked at by malicious people, just like Windows and Apple. The difference is that in Linux and Apple (Apple OS X is Linux based) there is a world-wide and open community working on the solutions, not employees of the company who’s loyalty to the company also dictates that you keep quiet until a solution is found.

I created a version of the utility that reported back where it was using message boxes. What I found out is that it is unable to rename the original ocx file that is in SYSWOW64. It did confirm for me that the user is running with elevated privileges. I tried turning off the anti-virus software, which was kind of strange because the virus software then asked me if I wanted to allow the utility to run, which I did. At this time, I don’t believe the issue is caused by anti-virus software.

As stated before, this utility runs on many/most computers with no issues. Any other suggestions?

Good suggestion. I hadn’t thought of that and the machines are not popping up any warnings that an application is attempting to write to the file system. I’ll look for that the next time I run into one of these problem machines.

I understand what you are saying about the installer having issues but that’s not it. The part that’s failing is a utility that was written in VB .Net 2. The utility does the following:
1) Unregisters MSCOMCTL.ocx. It uses regsvr32 and shells out using “Run As”. Since the utilit is already running as an elevated user, no UAC prompt is displayed.
2) Renames the file.
3) Replaces it with an older version of the oxc.
4) Registers the old version.
5) Unregisters the old version.
6) Deletes the old version.
7) Renames the original file back to the original name.
8) Registers it.

If I run this utility, I receive the correct UAC prompt. In the case of most users that are experiencing problems, they are administrators on their computers and they receive the correct UAC prompt but the utility fails to perform all of the steps. It is unable to rename the original ocx file. If, while logged in as the same user, I go into the SYSWOS64 folder, I can manually rename the file. I am not running Windows Explorer as an administrator so I receive the usual message to authorize the file to be renamed. I can also manually unregister and register the ocx using an elevated command prompt, while logged in as the same user. None of the computers that have experienced this problem are on a Windows domain.

I’m trying to figure out why UAC consider’s the elevated user’s security context different between running my utility and manually performing the steps in Windows Explorer and an elevated command prompt. I have been unable to reproduce the problem on any of my development computers.