Wednesday at Microsoft's annual CEO Summit in Seattle, Gates showed off an even more ambitious technology called TouchWall, which employs a combination of hardware and software to create an easy to use, white board-like touch interface.

"I always like to show something that's new, because that's kind of risky and exciting," said Gates.

Microsoft believes surface computing will be pervasive, and won't be limited to tabletops and walls, Gates said. "Our view is that all surfaces -- horizontal, vertical -- will eventually have an inexpensive screen display capability, and software that sees what you're doing there, so it's completely interactive."

A former Microsoft security manager has published a tool designed to detect and fix PCs that may be susceptible to 'endless reboots' if updated to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3).

Jesper Johansson, once a program manager for security policy at Microsoft and currently an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) who works at Amazon.com, posted a link to the tool on his blog on Wednesday, beating his former employer and HP to the draw. Neither company has yet come up with a fix or patch for the week-long snafu.

Windows XP SP3 review

Johansson's small, 16K VBScript (Visual Basic Scripting Edition) file checks whether the PC is running a processor from AMD, and if so, examines the Windows registry to see if a device driver meant for Intel-based machines is set to load.

"If it is, it will offer you an option to disable it," said Johansson in an update to a blog post where he has been summarising reports of Windows XP SP3 problems and offering solutions.

Microsoft claims Windows Vista is less prone to bugs than Windows XP, with security strategy director Jeff Jones claiming the newer OS required 20 percent fewer fixes in 2007 than the four-year-old Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).

Jones said that Microsoft plugged 45 holes in Vista during 2007 compared to 56 in Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the version of the aging operating system that was supplanted by SP3 only last week.

Windows XP SP3 review

Microsoft also patched fewer flaws marked 'critical' and 'important' - the top two rankings in its four-level vulnerability scoring system - in Vista (36 total) than in XP SP2 (50 total). By Microsoft's numbers, the company quashed 28 percent fewer critical or important bugs last year in Vista than in XP SP2.

Jones' analysis came in response to users' comments about a similar report he published in January that trumpeted Vista's security status on its first anniversary, he said. "In the wake of my Windows Vista One Year Vulnerability Report, which compared the 'first year of availability' of several products, I received many comments along the lines of "of course Windows Vista beats Windows XP as it shipped in 2001, but what about the current Windows XP SP2?"

Moving right along according to plan, the first release candidate of Firefox 3.0 appeared this morning among Mozilla's beta and candidate downloads. BetaNews has obtained the link, and RC1 is downloadable now.On previous occasions during this testing cycle, what appeared to be public betas of Firefox 3 showed up in just the right place on Mozilla's servers, at just the right time, but ended up being internal builds of the product. BetaNews is testing this RC1 download now, and will have more news about it later this afternoon.

UPDATE 12:43 pm ET May 16, 2008 - As best as we can tell, it's the genuine article. As expected, most of the plug-ins recently upgraded for usability with Beta 5 were inoperable in this version, though our plug-in to switch rendering engines with Internet Explorer at will, is functional. The "About" screen clearly registered the product as "Firefox 3.0" instead of "Firefox 3.0b5." And after installation, the browser attempted to load a "What's new in 3.0" page that does not yet exist.

But In a document published Tuesday that's sure to rile many in the 'Vista Sucks' camp, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) insists that the pain some users have experienced is due to misconceptions that exist about certain features in Vista and what makes them tick.

In Microsoft's view, the User Account Control feature in Vista, which has been widely criticized for the nagging alerts it generates, has been unfairly maligned in IT industry circles. "If there's one feature that has received a bad rap it's User Account Control," Microsoft said in the document.

As a security measure, Vista emphasizes that users run with reduced, or Standard User privileges, in order to lower the impact of security exploits by limiting file and registry access by applications on the PC.