There must be some brilliant comedians on Microsoft’s payroll.

On Windows XP SP3 today I noticed this “More themes online…” value in the theme combobox in Display Properties.

Clicking “More themes online…” opened my browser at a page explaining that if I want extra themes I’d have to buy Windows Vista. Microsoft really need to drop this spam tactic and simply remove the more themes link from the combobox. The page looked something like this:

Note the Flash applet on the left advertising Windows Live OneCare, itself having also already been discontinued. Pure class, Microsoft.

Also note the Silverlight installation link at the top of the page, even though the page uses Flash. I guess Silverlight tastes even worse than dogfood does (but not as bad as Visual SourceSafe).

In other news, what do you think happens when you press this Bookmark All button in Visual Studio 2005 SP1?

It bookmarks the search results, right? Wrong:

This brilliant error even sneaked through a service pack release. Nice testing regime you’ve got there, Microsoft.

Finally, why is middle-click page scrolling broken on MSDN Library for every single browser except IE? One imagines this has a lot to do with it.

Developers indeed.