Microsoft killed our systems again!

Just a couple of months ago, several of our Windows XP machines got screwed up by a false-positive antivirus alert which caused the antivirus service to delete critical system files. We couldn't believe it at first, all users login to limited accounts but the weak link was the antivirus service.

The machines wouldn't boot normally but did boot into safemode. Unfortunately, the System Restore facility failed so we couldn't just roll back to a restore point. While manually restoring the system, Microsoft's anti-piracy subsystem kicked in, rendering the system useless as it disallowed safemode logins.. and the system wouldn't boot normally. So we were locked out because Windows didn't think its licence had been activated, but we couldn't login to register/activate it!

Now just a couple of months later, this has happened.. an official Microsoft update has rendered the systems unusable again!

We're now looking at deploying a Debian-based Linux distribution on all our desktops. Microsoft Windows is a far too unstable for serious business use!