Hi Rider - to answer your research issue -

Please understand that no system is ever completely secure. No electrical path is 100 percent efficient, no plumbing is completely leak proof, and no software is 100 percent bug free. As much as we the users hate to see it, software companies consistently ship their software in an incomplete state, knowing what flaws already exist, and shortly thereafter release a patch or two to fix them. In the case of Windows, because it's of such a large magnitude, huge holes tend to exist. Others get found on down the line and are fixed as they're discoverd by the users. Hence we get SP1, SP2, and now the hotfix. The reason the companies do this is because they understand that the cannot make money fixing all their holes before a software is shipped out. Either they'll wind up blowing too much money into r&d to fix them, or, more commonly, their software will be out of date when it hits the market. There you have it. I hope this explains a bit more thoroughly for you. As to why softwares ship so late (the next question begged by this), I can only guess that perhaps the larger companies are learning that users won't tolerate constant updates, so they tried to find a happy medium for them - that being later shipping software with less holes.

Just my 2 cents, I could be wrong.