In April 2007, two Seattle area consumers, ticked off at buying new machines labeled "Vista Capable" that were anything but, . It became a class-action suit last February.

Since then, Ballmer & Co. have done everything humanly possible to implicate themselves except lead the police on a high-speed chase while driving a white Bronco with US$10,000, a fake beard, and a shovel in the trunk.

The e-mails that have emerged as evidence have been damning.

Last February, we learned from internal Microsoft e-mails that . Former Windows czar Jim Allchin even worried that changing the labeling requirements would mislead consumers. (Microsoft mislead consumers? Next you'll be telling me that .)

This week we heard from Hewlett-Packard, which invested beaucoup bucks in machines that could take advantage of the Aero Glass interface -- the one feature of Vista even Microsoft's critics agreed was mega-cool -- to meet the standards for the "Vista Capable" label. And then , slapping that label on systems using an old Intel 915 graphics chip set that couldn't possibly keep up, simply because Intel had a backlog of older chips it needed to move. You could , as Computerworld's Gregg Keizer notes: