You’re just going to love this little gem that MS allows. This “feature” has been known about for quite sometime. Remember hearing about the Sony-BMG rootkit? Them masking the software was the big portion of the mess. The second part was that MS ALLOWS drivers to be layered. Take the CD-ROM for example, the driver is the interface between the hardware and the OS. You can add another driver in between. This is how Sony-BMG kept people from copying the CD, this driver sees all of the IO and it decides what can pass. This is also very inefficient. The best part about this whole thing, once it’s there, it CANNOT be removed. If you remove it, the device will fail to work.

Some companies used this in practical ways. One such company uses it to provide synchronization between servers. They also say they support OS X, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, linux and Novell. All they talked about was how it worked in windows, not any other OS. Can you guess the reason? Only windows allows the driver to be stacked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit

Still think windows is secure? No matter what you do, it’s inherently insecure.

Shall I go on about their chatty network protocols?

How about OS throughput? Take the same hardware and use UNIX and you will get lower latency and higher throughput.