hutcheson - 5:29 pm on Dec 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

>was hailed as a technical innvoation in some quarters.

Yes. That says more about the intelligence, integrity, and technical acuity of some quarters than it does about the state of the art.

As a practicing programmer at the time, I thought it was a singularly idiotic way of consuming CPU cycles. As a GUI user, I wanted to make sure it was turned off. As a deliverer of software designed to run on Windows machines, I found it was a significant cost in development time and programmer pain.