My users never "wait" for the computer to shutdown. They click shutdown and walk away, not caring much if the computer hangs before halting or not... On the other hand they complain more often about slow startup caused by roaming profiles and group policies. So any speed up in the boot/logon process is welcome.

Well, the future sometimes bring unexpected plot twists... Even if its in the long term. http://www.pcworld.com/article/5156/microsoft_to_invest_in_apple_jobs_ellison_on_board.html

I'll stick to the X-X-X meaning

After losing 3com and 3par to HP, they always can try with 3M.

These Crashes are in the developement version which is completely opt in. Just like the beta. I don't see a major issue there. But I agree at least on the bandwith part. I like to turn off automatic updates for everythin when I'm using the laptop with my 3G connection. A notification about avalaible updates would be good and let choose the user when to update.

You have a much better option http://www.sexparty.org.au/

Ignorance is bliss

This will work till the next pedo scandal. Then the average citizens will ask themselves where the hell their taxes are going.

...is just the WRONG platform for this. Stock Exchange, like many transaction based business, needs real time systems and Windows 2003 plus SQL as far I know don't make a RT platform.

Yeah, we know this... ..as we know nobody uses it. I never spotted a single copy of it.

2008 R2, will give much more reasons to upgrade from 2003. Really interesting looks the move to 64bit only architectures, the vastly improved Hyper-V and the emphasis on performance optimizations. Related to the the Hyper-V enhancements and in particular the actual live migration support, I think that would be the moment to position itself as a real alternative to VMWare and Xen based hypervisors. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2-top-reasons.aspx/.