I agree to some extent. A properly configured Windows system should not have to be rebooted daily. However, at work, when I come in in the morning, my PC cannot connect to the exchange server. When I finally give up and reboot, right before it shuts down, it says the connection has been restored, right after the shutdown screen comes up. Sometimes I have to reboot two or three times to get it to connect to my network drive. We've had viruses run rampant through the college, despite running a virus program and a firewall. We have a $30,000 net nanny system called WebSense that has the system shut down tightly. We can't access any streaming media at all, and eBay, FR, and probably over half the internet sites are blocked. Our baseball coach wanted to run a blog when our team went to the playoffs, but the school wouldn't help him set one up, and when he started one on one of the free blog sites, guess what? It was blocked. I have to get email from my students at my home email address because our spam settings on mail are set so tight I can't count on getting emails. Our entire campus network is set up for the convenience of the IT department, and my system in my office still locks up frequently. I haven't installed a d*mn thing on it or changed my configuration, and it still runs like a gasoline Pinto with diesel in the fuel tank.
At home, I run a Mac system with Photoshop for my sideline business. Each of my two daughters have Macs with a wireless network. I don't know IT and I don't WANT to know IT. I routinely open seven or eight photos from an 8 megapixel camera in Photoshop on my Mac to make comparisons between shots, and locking up or freezing is never a problem. A friend of mine was using Photoshop elements on his PC at work (two years newer than my Mac), and I asked him to show me the interface. It locked up on him twice while he was showing it to me, and he was using 300K photos to show me the program, and never had more than two open.
The whole point is this: If a bunch of IT people, with years of training, who spend all day doing nothing but dealing with PCs can't set up a system properly, how does an average user like me, who doesn't need or want to spend his entire life dedicated to making a computer run without crashing have a chance?
I did a photo session Monday night at 6:30 PM. Went to work the next day, and didn't get to start editing until 9:00 PM Tuesday night. By midnight, I had the photos finished, this web page posted, and an email off to the lady who bought the photo session. There's no way I could have done that on a PC. During football season, I have an even tighter schedule, as I have to shoot the Friday night games, and have the photos posted in time for the newspapers that buy my work to pick out their photos in the morning.
Your work envirnoment his a very complex network with lots of people attempting to manage lots of security issues. On top of that you seem to have college students attempting to break it. At the very least they are downloading "free" stuff, and getting viruses along with their free stuff.
We have a winner. Your case at work sounds a great deal like my work - but we run Novel for networking at the school where I teach. What a pain - And we have full-time IT as well.