[616c]

I am sure I will get downvoted to all hell, but were you serious? And do other people trust MSFT for similar reasons?

(This, by the way, as a full time IT guy for 6+ years bc of bad Windows software makes me continuously feel the opposite; I did not even open a Hotmail/Live account until I was forced to try and report a bug with MSFT Connect, which requires it.)

[teh_klev]

I remember, once upon a time, you could just phone up Microsoft (UK) for support. This was early 1995 when I was battling with video driver stability problems on an Olivetti M series PC running a beta of Windows 95. The nice helpful person on the other end of the phone asked me to get updated drivers and lo and behold everything magically started to work.

On a serious note MSFT Connect is basically a ghost town. There are so many well documented and easily reproducible issues logged on Connect that languish there for months and months with no-one paying attention. I logged a fairly crippling issue with IIS7, complete with steps to repro, and it was ignored.

The only way to get any kind of support is to pay for a PSS incident. If the root cause does lie firmly in MS's backyard they do at least refund your money. I even got a knowledge base article written up about one of my PSS logged issues :)

(ex-Gold Partner IT guy here)