[general_re]

Speaking from my own experience, I will say that often it's not a matter of simply avoiding updates, as I'm sure you know. But companies that have a couple of critical apps, or crufty old legacy apps that need to work, will tend to take a good long time testing patches before going live, rather than patching willy-nilly and potentially breaking something important. Unfortunately, that delay for testing often exposes them to problems as well. Can't win for trying, some days ;)

[js1138]

Yes, I can recall database programs that took forever to work with Wondows 2000, ones that still don't work with XP. I worked for a software company that dumped 40 million dollars on a database program that had to be re-written from scratch several times as the development tools evolved. I quit just before the purge, but to the best of my knowledge, not a single developer survived that fiasco.

All the really talented programmers I've known have a tendencey to overreach the technology, then wonder why things don't work with new releases of the OS. All te successful programmers I've known have a tendency to use vanilla code. I've got programs written on UNIX C fifteen years ago that compile and run under XP.