If my CPU is going to be wasting cycles on something I'd prefer that it was something vaguely useful. So I get a bit grumpy when I read that even something innocent like having the 'show icon when connected' option ticked on my WiFi link is costing me CPU cycles and other resources. It's only a little bit ... but when you consider that MSN Search, Google Desktop, Windows Defender and a whole bunch of MS and third party apps all exhibit this rather lazy behaviour (sometimes 10s, or even hundreds of times, a second) you have to wonder what it would take to make them do a bit of housekeeping!

Luckily SysInternals has now been bought by Microsoft and Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell will hopefully be well positioned to make sure that silly things like this get weeded out of Vista and the other MS products...