"I hope this incident isn't a foretaste of the relationship I will have with Microsoft going forward, but I can tell you that it's left a very bad taste with me and my team," Richard Walker, senior vice president at HP's consumer PC unit, said in a Feb. 1, 2006, message to senior Microsoft executives.

The moral here: Don't turn your back on Redmond, unless you want to be ****** in the ****.

(Kicked in the keister, of course. What did you think I meant?)

Now Ballmer may have to take the stand in his and Microsoft's own defense. That ought to be rich.

So far, Ballmer has employed the Sergeant Schultz "I know nothink" defense. Attorneys for the litigants want to find out . Of particular interest is what Ballmer and Intel honcho Paul Otellini discussed in a phone call back in January 2006, when Intel was chomping at the bit to get Microsoft to change its labeling requirements.