>So why - if they are going to let VFP wither on the vine - would they go to all the trouble of tossing the COM instantiation feature? You would think that COM instability would be useful fodder for their argument to kill VFP.
>
>It doesn't make sense - why put a bullet in a corpses head if it's already dead?:-)

Because, my guess would be, someone made big noise when the feature didn't work in VFP7 and they had probably enough clout to give MS some headache. So they probably got a lot of help to... move over, and the thing didn't get fixed either, it got amputated. So maybe it wasn't a big deal - tooth isn't a big thing, toothache is.

>We all expect M$ to play it's little games, and we've known for quite sometime as M$ morphed from a half decent tools maker to a back door man for the brain police.

That's the ambiguity of English. People foolishly imagine it's "(Malicious Software) + Removal + tool", but it's actually "Malicious + (Software Removal tool)". IOW, not a tool to remove malicious software, but a malicious tool for software removal (or reporting). You remove morphology from a language, you gain ambiguity OTOH. Which can be useful - you can always say one thing, mean another, and then claim that you meant the other, if ever pressed to.

>But why pay engineers to remove something when it's no big deal?
>Ya know what I mean?:-)

R6... that's european for AA, in just-battery-no-assault lingo. 1.5V alcaline, 1.2V rechargeable.