IE7 works, Firefox crashes, Flock slows to a crawl, and I get confused.

I'm not generally fickle about Microsoft. I've been a F.O.S.S. advocate for almost a decade, and have been burned repeatedly by my insistance upon testing the bleeding edge of tech with each new "innovation" (Winblows Mobile 5, for example). A year or so ago I so mussed my IE6 security settings so that every half k of page load caused a modal warning...but I didn't care cause I rarely used it. Then Firefox failed me for the umpteenth time and well, it was time to bleed again with IE7 on my notebook.

So I ran Windows Update and got IE7.... and lost my internet connectivity.

Now Firefox was good in my mind until Google bought it, and then it started downhill. Memory leaks, crashes, and that ridiculously unacceptable Acrobat plugin problem. Flock was great... until a month or so ago when I updated and got the new, super-slow version. Seamonkey was promising...but looks like my legacy install of Firebird so I haven't spent much time with it.

I checked my system and wow... years worth of crap in Windows including a less-than-rock-solid dual boot Debian setup, a nice-but-high-risk VMWare setup, an outdated manual privoxy install, some anti-google TCP/IP modifications. Troubleshooting the failed IE7 install was not going to be fun.

And then I called Microsoft. That's right. I called the IE7 support number, and got an agent in under 1 minute (despite the stated 3-5 minute hold times). My agent (whose name I should remember but don't- sorry) did an excellent job of stepping through a diagnostic. Despite my efforts to obfuscate my complexity (sorry again) she did an excellent and efficient job of walking through a check that enabled IE7, and then even went through the steps to put everything back. AND, she made an excellent suggestion for fixing the conflict permanently.

All for free.

And IE7 works like a charm. Firefox still crashes, Flock is still slow as molasses, and Seamonkey..well, I'll admit that the name/UI is holding me back from further testing.

The same day I suffered through another half hour of horrible customer service from Verizon (they ought to change their tagline to "Verizon: The World's Most Reliable Source of Disappointment"). In my experience, M$ is putting some of those massive revenues to work for the user by providing free support like this.

And that has me confused.