Jim,

Good points. It's not an easy issue, because I'm sure MS Legal might have issues with the community making decisions and pre-processing support requests (AKA bug reports) submitted on an official MS site.

However, I do agree very much with your comments about the drag on productivity when we don't have access to an official list of confirmed bugs. It does take time to track down a bug and even more time to create a repro and report it.

Having access to a list of known issues (whether or not that includes status info) would be very helpful, indeed. Of course, once they did that, we'd be hammering away at them for status info, too, which probably has its own set of legal issues.

>After reading JohnK's reply it was my conclusion that what would be the most advantageous/least cost (to VFP Team) would be to have access to the formal and maintained list of "authorized" (meaning successfully repro'ed, not 'approved' < s >) bugs. You know, the one that the VFP Team is already working with.
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>I did like the suggestion, though, that UT and other venues could act as pre-screeners. I envision several people trying the reported bug and reporting repro (or not) and suggestion workarounds. All that would be needed in such cases would be some way to get it into MS' hands for addition to their list.
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>JohnK convinced me of the resource issue, but it is true that WE (collectively) also have a "resource issue", countless people EACH losing lots of time discerning a bug and its workaround. I'd bet that some (well known to MS) bugs have consumed tens of thousands of hours across the user spectrum.
>Frankly, some effort by MS to mitigate that ought to be intrinsic to their thinking, company-wide!
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>cheers
>