Microsoft said last Friday that it has made changes in Vista intended to keep it out of the antitrust courts in either Europe or South Korea, both of which claim its bundling is anticompetitive.

At the same time, Microsoft reiterated its promise that Vista would ship worldwide to volume business accounts next month and to the general public in January, meaning Vista will have to go to manufacturing momentarily.

Korea is going to get special versions of the OS that link to competitive media players. Microsoft is hoping to release the Korean editions when the software ships to the rest of the world and release an OS stripped of its Media Center when the first Vista service pack arrives.

It remains to be seen whether the European Commission is going to be satisfied with Microsoft's changes which include giving security rivals like Symantec and McAfee APIs to override the Windows alert system and, separately, to access the Vista kernel.

Microsoft is also supposed to let users set their own default search program, submit its Adobe PDF-like XML Paper Specification (XPS) format to a standards organization and revise its licensing terms for XPS.

Microsoft said it had committed to the EC that these changes would stick no matter which way the Europe court finds in Microsoft's appeal of the two-year-old European antitrust verdict.

Microsoft claimed Monday that the widgetry that the third-party security houses need to override Vista's native security dashboard was being loaded on a web site.

Symantec and McAfee said they need all the data right away to make the November rollout schedule, otherwise, they claim, they're gonna be kinda useless and Microsoft products will dominate.

McAfee in particular has raised a public stink about being locked out of the kernel by Patchguard, the newfangled anti-hacking tool that appears only in the 64-bit version of Vista that's there to keep it out. Security vendors have never been locked out of the Windows kernel before but Microsoft has maintained that doing so safeguards Vista's security and stability. Now it's changing it tune. Naturally hackers are already targeting Patchguard.

If Microsoft pacifies Symantec, McAfee, Check Point Software and the rest, the EC is less likely to give Vista a hard time.

So far McAfee isn't at all pacified.

On Wednesday it was complaining that it wasn't getting the promised kernel-level APIs to circumvent PatchGuard, or, in fact, much information about overriding the Windows Security Center. Reuters caught up with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who claimed Microsoft had released the APIs and he was basically done talking about it.

However, it now appears that the kernel APIs don't exist, won't be available until after Vista RTMs and, in fact, won't be useable in the first Vista release anyway. They'lll need a service pack because the kernel is going to have to be changed and all the Vista applications retested. Gartner is saying it will take years - it figures the first Vista service pack for early 2008 but it will take at least another service pack after that until all of the really heavy lifting is done. Gartner is anticipating incompatibility problems in the meantime.

As of Thursday, Microsoft was supposed to have an online briefing with security vendors about scheduling complete with PowerPoint slides. Ahead of the morning meeting McAfee was telling people it probably won't get everything it needs until after Vista is out.

Symantec was completely disgusted with the whole idea of limited, indirect access to the kernel going into the meeting. It figures it won't be able to respond to evolving threats.

Anyway, Microsoft used its Live Meeting software for the briefing and 15 minutes into it, the thing crapped out and most of the people trying to participate were knocked off and couldn't get back in. Microsoft either accommodated them later or will at another briefing now set for Monday.

At end of business Thursday, McAfee issued a statement the press was told to put in the mouth of Christopher Thomas, a partner at Lovells, McAfee's outside litigation counsel in Brussels. It said, "Despite pledges, press conferences and speeches by Microsoft, the community of independent security companies that consumers rely on for computer protection has seen little indication that Microsoft intends to live up to the promises it made last week. We have been greatly disappointed by the lack of action by the company so far and Microsoft has not lived up, either in detail or in spirit, to the hollow assurances offered by their top management last week."

Microsoft has been wrestling with the EC over Vista since at least last spring, a situation that had Microsoft threatening at one point not to ship Vista in Europe. And word Monday suggests the EC might have tried to stop its launch. The Commission continues to take a wait-and-see position on Vista's legality and says it will examine any complaints "on their own merits." It may be hearing from McAfee and the boys.

What Microsoft has working for it is the projected slow uptake of 64-bit Vista on the desktop but the situation has all the makings of the protocol documentation flap that got Microsoft into hot water with the EC earlier this year and cost it a new round of fines.

The EC has repeatedly contended it was not its place to give Microsoft advice on how to beat the system or to give Vista the green light before it was delivered. However, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith claimed Friday during a press conference that "In the last month or so the Commission gave us guidance that was quite explicit and direct. We got the clarity that we felt we needed" to address the EC's issues and release the operating system.

According to Smith, said guidance consisted of the EC's reactions to the information about changes in Vista that Microsoft provided in August in response to 79 questions that the EC had asked it. The EC, he said, wanted the changes Microsoft has made in search, XPS and security.

--Copyright Client/Server News