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Simple. Microsoft shut down all new development for a window of time (I think it was 45 days) on all applications early this year. They proceeded to commit the entire technical workforce (no sales, support, upper management, etc.) to hacking their stuff. Every line of code had a complete review. They did a securty sweep. They found literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of bugs. They in turn took all code that was vunerable and started re-working it. Everything. Not because they were bowing to pressure. MS doesn't do that. It was because they wanted to make sure they could use the marketing of opportunities like this one to ensure a top position. ("Hey, we haven't had ANY new code issues from the outside world since we did our review...") Yes, it's marketing, yes it's customer service, yes it's sales. Sometimes good things come (including all the found errors in the last 6 months) from non-altruistic reasons. Much to the Demonrats dismay. Business does things for the utmost in profits.

Every line of code had a complete review.
Every line of code? There's about 30 million lines of code in Win2k/XP. Not to mention the ones in Office. They'll have to do 1-2 million lines of code a day in 45 days to go through it all.