Dual booting may be a necessary evil, or perhaps a good thing?

[Michael ODonnell]

> My laptop dual boots for various PITA windows only things (specifically,
> our new backup server -REQUIRES- IE to log into it and create new backup
> shares, we have opened this as a "bug" trouble ticket with the company)

If the people who wrote your backup software show
such poor judgement that they designed the system
to use ActiveX you're basically stuck with IE (and
possibly vulnerable to various exploits...)

But a lot of otherwise useful http-enabled stuff
works perfectly well with Mozilla/Firefox and other
civilized browsers, if only you can get past the
dainbramaged part where they mindlessly require
that the User-Agent string in the HTTP header be the
string from IE.  I am happy to report that the VERY
cool hack available at:

   http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragentswitcher/download/

...has enabled me to successfully lie my way past %99
of such dainbramaged systems.  Worth a try...