In all fairness to M$ here it's not technically their fault that some third party vendors product is detrimentally affecting the operation of their OS. They are stuck between the proverbial rock/hard place here. If they don't draw attention to the fact that it's someone elses stuff that is messing with their system then their product will be thought of as a POS. If they do, and tell people how to improve the apparent performance of M$'s product, then all the security types jump on them like you are Hoss...... The one thing they really can't do is to advise that the user uninstall that AV product in preference for another - can you imagine the lawsuits there?

While the advice may seem to be lunacy it would never have been proffered if M$ came with it's own AV. But since they rely upon a third party for this and it's the third party's software causing the problem they don't have any choice but to proffer the advice.

A similar analagy would be someone complaining that they can't network their machines at home any more. Then they reveal that they purchased a software firewall and installed it which is blocking the connection attempts. Unfortunately, the firewall doesn't allow the user to control port access. Microsoft's _only_ recourse, if the client insists on networking the machines, is to tell them to turn off the firewalls. Lunacy? Yes. Fair advice bearing in mind the priorities of the user? Yes.