An e-mail thread from October 2005, more than 15 months before Vista debuted, showed that an article in The Wall Street Journal by columnist Walter Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg spelled out his recommendations for a desktop PC, focusing on the features buyers should keep in mind if they wanted to run Vista when it hit the street.

But one paragraph caught the eye of Padmanand Warrier, a developer in the Windows group. Warrier e-mailed a link to Mossberg’s column to several others in the company, including Rajesh Srinivasan — at the time a product manager in the Windows group — and Richard Russell, a Microsoft development manager. Warrier quoted briefly from the Mossberg piece.

“You won’t have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer’s Macintosh computers, which don’t run Windows,” Mossberg had written. “Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger [at that time, the most-current Mac OS X — Ed.], is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista.”

Warrier added his own comment. “A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].”

That got an almost-immediate rise out of Russell, who acknowledged that Microsoft had not done its job in promoting Windows Vista. “My takeaway from Walt’s article is that we have failed to communicate Vista’s value,” Russell said in an e-mail reply sent just 20 minutes after Warrier fired off his.

Russell went on to defend Vista, specifically its ability to “run on a very wide-ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable,” he said. “Apple doesn’t do that.”

Colleen Healy, general manager of investor relations, made the statement during a conference call with Wall Street analysts after Microsoft posted its third-quarter earnings. The company pointed to strong PC sales for helping the much-maligned operating system achieve that number.

However, revenue from Microsoft’s client division, which overwhelmingly comes from sales of Windows Vista or XP licenses, was down 24% from last year’s third quarter to $4.03 billion. Chris Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, attributed the decrease to strong sales a year ago immediately after Vista’s launch, plus increased software piracy in developing countries and other reasons.

Attackers have already tried to exploit that bug, which was patched last Tuesday — as it turned out, two weeks after the newest build of Windows XP SP3 was released with the flaw fixed.

According to reports from multiple users on a Microsoft support newsgroup, PCs began rebooting immediately after they had been updated to SP3. “I have just updated my pc from xp sp2 to sp3,” said a user identified as “yaojinglin” in a message to an SP3 support forum last Thursday. “The installation was successful, but when I reboot my pc after the installation finished, my pc started to reboot again and again.”

Nearly two months before, some Windows Vista users experienced similar endless rebooting after an update designed to prepare machines for the upcoming Service Pack 1 locked up PCs. It’s believed that the similarities are a coincidence.

“Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version [of Windows operating system. I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways,” said Bill Gates at a conference of Inter-American Development Bank, reports Cnet News.com.

Also on Thursday Microsoft said that it would continue to offer its Windows XP Home operating system for low cost computers until mid-2010 or “one year after general availability of the next version of Windows”. The claim implies that Microsoft does plan to release its Windows 7 in mid-2009, a little more than a year from now.

Early in 2007 the company indicated that it would replace Windows Vista in two or two and a half years from them. However, already in mid-2007 the world’s largest software firm said that it would take it three years to create the new code-named Vienna operating system, which official name is projected to be Windows 7. In Janury, 2008, the world’s largest software developer implied that the new version of Windows was due in 2011.

Why? For a couple of reasons: XP is the most widely used operating system on the planet, and its long-delayed successor, Windows Vista, is not proving to be universally popular. The companies that make up the enterprise market for Windows are dragging their feet about upgrading, and on the consumer side there are signs of a rebellion against Vista. Microsoft has already made changes in its timetables. Last year, the company extended the sales life cycle — the time during which PC manufacturers and system builders could sell computers with XP installed — to June 30, 2008. It will stop selling XP altogether on Jan. 31, 2009. And it extended the mainstream support period for XP to April 14, 2009, in an effort to reassure customers made nervous by the long delays in shipping Vista.

The result of all this tweaking is that Microsoft will stop selling XP long before it stops supporting it. You may be able to run XP for as long as you want, but before too long you may not be able to buy a legitimate copy of XP to run.

Some customers have voiced displeasure with Vista due to a lack of compatibility with existing software programs and devices. The hardware requirements needed to run Vista also are a significant upgrade from many older computers. The company downplayed any dissatisfaction with Vista, saying it is the fastest-selling operating system in the history of Microsoft. As of the end of June, Microsoft had sold more than 60 million Windows Vista licenses.

“As of last week, we’ve (sold) nearly 40 million copies,” Gates said. “That’s twice as fast as the adoption of Windows XP, the last major release we had.” Confirming news that had already leaked on its Web site, Microsoft also announced Windows Server 2008 as the official name of Windows Server “Longhorn,” which is due to be finalized later this year.

In announcing the Windows Server 2008 moniker, Gates poked a little fun at his company’s penchant for less-than-dynamic product names. “We’ve been working hard thinking about it,” Gates said. “We played around with a couple different ideas, but what we are going to go with is…Windows Server 2008. We know it’s a surprise for us to pick something so straightforward.”

Microsoft will post Longhorn beta 3 code on a special Web page sometime Wednesday evening Eastern Time, said Ward Ralston, senior technical product manager for the software. It’s the first time anyone who’s interested can get their hands on the product, which has been in private beta release only until now.

Wednesday also will be the first time users can get a look at a new scripting and command-line technology, Microsoft PowerShell, at work from within Longhorn server, he said. The technology, which allows administrators to more easily automate tasks across Windows servers on a network, previously was available as a separate add-on, but will be built directly into Longhorn and is making its first appearance in a test version of the product.

Dell, like many computer makers, stopped offering XP on most home desktops and laptops soon after Vista launched at the end of January. By late March, the company said only two models aimed at home users could be configured with XP (the option still existed on many models for business users).

But on Dell’s IdeaStorm Web site, where visitors can post suggestions for the company and vote on the ones they think are important, a plea titled “Don’t eliminate XP just yet” racked up more than 10,700 votes.