The story of Windows Vista has been a scrappy one to date. Three years late, with countless stops and starts, plus a rewrite-from-scratch, has left public confidence more than a little shaken. However, its public release towards the end of 2006 should see the operating system back on track. Here’s a short rundown on what has happened so far:

The last two versions of Windows client released by Microsoft were the enterprise edition, Windows 2000, and the home edition, ME, both launched at the turn of the Millennium.

A new version, codenamed Longhorn, was set to ship in 2003, with a totally new file storage system, WinFS. Problems with the latter led to it being dropped from the package, while the immense complexity of the Byzantine architecture blew out the best brains in Redmond, Wash.

In 2004, Jim Allchin, head honcho at the time, burst into Bill Gates’s office and announced, “It ain’t going to work. We’ll have to start again!” A year late, and back to square one. Not a very lovely prospect for Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect. Somehow Allchin prevailed. How, we may never know. The upshot is they started all over again, using a Linux-like kernel structure, and hanging applications around it.

The current timeline is for Windows Vista to ship to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) in June 2006, so that machines can be out in time for the Christmas and holiday buying season.

Microsoft’s main objectives are to improve security, deployment, manageability and performance. The OS will ship with Windows Internet Explorer 7, which includes features to guard against spoofing and phishing attacks. “Other security features,” says VnuNet, “include Windows Service Hardening, which monitors for abnormal activity in the file system and registry, full-volume disk encryption and support for Trusted Platform Module security chips. The firewall in Windows Vista has also been upgraded to filter outgoing as well as incoming traffic.”