>When I was running NT 3.51 back in 1995, video drivers (for example) ran outside the kernel. NT4 moved them back in for "performance reasons". Besides, with rare exceptions (e.g. USB driver vulns) this addresses stability, not security.

The problem was the old Alpha chip that only had two security modes in the CPU. One was for kernel code, the other for user code. Intel chips have 4...so now that the Alpha is gone, Microsoft is moving device drivers to ring 1. This should increase stability as most BSOD issues are caused by faulty device drivers.

>FF renders more sites properly than you probably think. For example, this site (UT) is pretty complex and FF runs it just fine. I use IE far less than 1% of the time for those few (typically 2nd or 3rd tier e-commerce) sites that don't work properly with FF, and those sites are becoming fewer all the time.

Could be. I tried FF, but despised tabbed browsing. But I have many internal sites where it won't work.

>Care to elaborate? (the article author should have but didn't)

The current GDI is over 20 years old and hasn't kept up with current display technology. GDI+ isn't much better and is pretty ugly to code to. Avalon completly changes the way you do any UI. Everything, including 2D and 3D graphics is easy to do. Fonts are rendered better and scale without getting jaggy. You can easily take, say, a radio button and have it use video instead of buttons, or put video inside a list box. If that seems like overkill to you, how about charts and graphs, or new, easier to use UI features. I can't describe everything in a short paragraph. Here are some links:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/msdnmag/issues/06/01/WindowsPresentationFoundation/toc.asp?frame=true

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/wpf101.asp?frame=true

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnlong/html/introwpf.asp?frame=true

I haven't even discussed Indigo, InfoCards, Workflow, and other things.

>OEMs - no way. They image hard drives, do no installations whatsoever. Large corporate IT departments are probably (or should be) looking at imaging options as well. This feature (if it makes it into the final product) would actually be of most use for smaller shops doing manual installations.

I know that we image ...but there are still things that have to be customized (printers, network drives, etc) for each user. There is also application setup. There are changes coming with Windows Installer so you won't need to require Admin to install an application. Running in Least Privledge will really work (security feature).