>They never had any trust to violate, only a strange (and completely incorrect) sense that they knew more than the engineers who built the OS in the first place

>They never had any trust to violate, only a strange (and completely incorrect) sense that they knew more than the engineers who built the OS in the first place. So regardless of the metrics that support such practice, and casting aside the thousands of people that have routinely seen benefit from the practice, Windows can't be optimized further by the end-user? As someone who has never encountered a well optimized Microsoft product, and as someone who has routinely had to modify their off-the-shell installs, color me suspicious. (Agreed, the shady practices and over-zealous disabling of services should stop; but come on -- the end user occasionally understands what they need to do better than the engineer that sold them a generic tool to facilitate generic computer-enabled work.)