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No shit. My Vista Ultimate system uses nearly 1GB RAM at startup, and I don't have many services running or apps installed, since nothing I have works on Vista yet..

At work we decided that having a couple of developers running Vista from day one would the best way to ensure our compatibility. Sounded like a great idea till I drew that particular short straw...

Then maybe you should be removed form Windows support and reassigned or let go. Sorry but if you have these problems "all the time" then you are doing something wrong.

Yeah, right. It's my fault Microsoft patches often cause problems. My fault and the fault of thousands of others who just don't know what they're doing, I suppose. Let's see what a google search turns up:

• August 30, 2006 - IE patch breaks Exchange 2000
• August 16, 2006 - Microsoft patch may crash IE when certain websites are viewed.
• June 16, 2006 - Microsoft patch breaks dial-up networking
• April 18, 2006 - Microsoft patch breaks HP software
• April 16, 2006 - Microsoft patch breaks web pages ON PURPOSE (EOLAS problem passed on to their users)
• April 14, 2006 - IE patch breaks Siebel client
• October 29, 2005 - Another Black Eye for Microsoft Patch Creation Process
• May 13, 2005 - Faulty Microsoft Update Rekindles Patch Quality Concerns

I could go on. That's just the tip of the iceberg. It's a known issue. Has been for years. Many of those links point to articles saying things like "Patches have caused trouble at times, on occasion prompting Microsoft to fix already released updates" and "When we are dealing with Microsoft updates, one thing we always reiterate, then reiterate some more, is to test before deploying. The guidance is always to download, test, then deploy the patches. With Microsoft, the test section of our guidance has gotten larger and larger."

That you haven't experienced problems with ANY Microsoft patches but SP2 is at best an anomoly.

Where I work we've got about 500 windows computers, give or take. Those run on a rather eclectic mix of hardware, some as old as P2s, some as new as Core 2 Duos. Servers, workstations, you name it. We run a pretty eclectic mix of software too. Off the top of my head some examples would be Matlab, HFSS, Photoshop, Office, Vegas, Visual Studio, Metrowerks, Miktek and so on. A fairly diverse Windows environment, in other words.

Wow. I'm happy for you. Your parents must be so proud.

Wanna know how many patches ever came out that broke systems? One: SP2. How many broke? 2, both personal systems loaded to the gills with spyware. We wiped them to get rid of the spyware, they took the update and worked fine. That's a pretty good track record. Comparable to Solaris (which we also run a lot of)

So, is it your policy to automatically patch production servers using AutoUpdate? You've never run a competitor's database or application stack on any of your Windows servers? All the software you mentioned is desktop software. Because if you have, you'll find service packs breaking things aplenty. I'm not talking desktop apps. I'm talking backend. I'm actually fairly comfortable setting desktops (since XP stabilized) to auto update. I would never apply a patch to a production server without full testing on test servers to make sure things like, oh, let's see...the latest SQL Server service pack doesn't cause function FOO of product BAR to stop working...because that happens...frequently.

Now let's compare that to, say, Fedora, which we also run.

I never said anything about Linux. Patch management seems to be an equal

There are some ideas as to how this could be done are here - http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=3282

A good rundown of the threats and fixes appear here http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=2068. It recommends unregistering the shimgvw.dll and installing the patch made by Ilfak Guilfanov.

I wonder when we'll see a Microsoft patch?

According to this link it's a hoax:
http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=1373

Shame tho!