"Mostly, I bet, that's because users are generally lazy and ignorant, and fear any change - even for the better."
Absolutely. We had the situation about eight months back where an upgrade to an inhouse database application required users to perform about 6 pages of instructions. I say six, but in reality it was about half a page of numbered steps with screenshots of everything making up the bulk of each page.
We get a support call on day one. "Uh, yeah I read step one and I'm just lost. Can someone come help?", or to translate into user-speak "I can't be arsed to try doing this, you come do it for me". Scarily enough, some of these people asking for this kind of help are senior engineers and high level accountants: people who should be at least intelligent enough to read instructions and follow them.
We have 1500 employees and 12 IT staff members. We had less than two weeks to complete the changeover or be charged exhorbitant fees by the consultants for "supporting legacy systems".
Steps 1 through 10 (yeah it was one of those apps) has things like "Open the application", "Click File -> Settings and write the informaiton in the field that says User Name", followed with gratuitous screen shots of what the user will see, circuling what information to copy, etc. Seriously, I don't know what it is about some users that once they see a keyboard and a mouse it's all baffling as hell but they can figure out just fine how to tie their shoelaces and drive a big, dangerous car around.