All your security belong to us.

As it turns out, if you have WinXP SP2 or Vista and want to take control of security yourself, specifically by revoking a root certificate for some reason....well, it turns out that you can't. It's silently "restored" for you, whether you want it to be or not, and you can't turn that behavior off.

The Redmond response is the usual "We have nothing to say" stonewall.

This is the last Windows computer I'm going to own. There are a couple of programs (games) that are Windows only and are painfully sluggish in WiNE, but playing those games isn't worth the security hassles of Windows, and it certainly isn't worth the continual and unavoidable attitude that Redmond knows better than I do what I want to do with my computer. If I'm mucking around with revoking the root certificates, then either a) I don't know what I'm doing, and deserve whatever happens, including getting to learn how to manually restore the certs, or b) I do know what I'm doing, in which case I don't want or need the OS 'fixing' it for me.

In a way I suppose I should be grateful to Microsoft. They're making the decision to switch to Linux very easy.