On the heals of Microsoft's annoucement of world domination via 60 million copies of Windows Vista, the CD New Blog reports: Here's the list of fixes in those new Vista fix packsIt is certain for ongoing domination in the operating system area, Microsoft needs to get a product on the market that doesn't feed off of updates.
"Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios." So it was a dog to begin with and you'll have to update away to get anything usable!
The likely result of all the updates and patches is that in a couple years if you system crashes you'll spend weeks downloading them all after you reload Vista.
I believe if you look at the hardware and operating system developments since the advent of CP/M you'll find that every year the hardware is faster, more capable and more relible.
In comparison, Windows seems to take a step back with every advancement. If it instead progressed as the hardware has, you could run Vista on an 8080 system with 16k of ram and 256k floppy disk!