Screwed Again by Microsoft

Well in a fit of insanity, stupidity, or just plain forgetfullness I went ahead tonight and ran autoupdate for my Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system. It's been over a year since I've done this and I was way behind on "Required Security Updates".

Well I have all my updates install now. My system is secure. It is also practically useless. By installing these updates Microsoft apparently reinstall my registry. I lost all configurations in every non-Microsoft program on my PC.

It looks like all my data is still here. But I have to now go through every program on my computer and reconfigure it to work the way I want it to.

To start with everything that was sitting on my desktop is gone. The files are still in the desktop folder, they just don't show up on the desktop anymore. So I had to move them all to another directory then back onto the desktop.

When I open my Firefox browser it opened up like a brand new program. My bookmarks, settings, everything was gone. I had to go find my bookmarks file and reattach it to the program.

I opened up Thunderbird and it also was blank. It started out asking me if I wanted to set up an e-mail account. It looks like all my mail accounts are still on the hard drive I just need to figure out how to get thunderbird to recognize them again.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I will need to essentially rebuild my system from the ground up.

So I only have two questions - If I installed these security updates to prevent my system from getting hacked, and Microsoft essentially hacked my system, wiping out everything I use. What's the difference between them and a hacker. Either way, I'm looking at probably 40 to 50 hours of work to recover from my decision to make my computer safer.

Second Question? If I was using Internet Explorer and Outlook would this have happened? Probably not.

This is just one more reason why I think Microsoft is the most criminally dishonest company in business today. They are starting to make the oil companies look honest.