I'm sure there's no good reason why IE8 messes with this file. I'll take this random bloggers word over the thousands of smart geeks working for Microsoft any day.
From poking around some support forums, it looks like the beta versions of IE8 would not function properly if you had certain non-default options in your boot.ini file. I'm guessing that in the RC, they tried to fix this by rewriting the boot.ini to a default state. Perhaps this process failed due to non-default permissions on that file.
You might be on to something here. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a boot flag (PAE is a common troublemaker) that causes some sort of problem for IE's new process isolation feature, which I understand to be a real rabbit hole.
I am not sure what you are disagreeing with here. If the result is people's machines not booting, surely something must have gone wrong, and it can't be a bloggers mistake. Unless you think that the thousands of smart geeks are intentionally crippling the machines (it's not a bug, it's a feature!)
Remember however,that the worst architectural decisions (coupling windows + IE?) have been taken for business purposes. Legacy and bad management can and does wipe out the benefits of legions of smart programmers.
What is the "business reason" for KDE's coupling of KHTML thoroughly into its shell? Why do we assume that such a decision would be made only for business reasons?
