Microsoft's customers have had their work cut out for them for the past month where it comes to keeping up with software bugs. Since the start of May, Microsoft has created and released patches for Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server, Media Player 9, Internet Explorer and Passport (twice). It also released Windows 2000 SP4, but many users had to apply a patch to correct a flaw in the service pack. During the same month, Microsoft managed to annoy its Australian customers because the Windows XP activation servers fell over, leaving then with a voicemail message announcing that the service was unavailable. Windows XP is unusable without centralised product activation, although some business editions of the operating system do not require customers to activate them. In the UK, there was chaos at many ports where staff had to revert to paper-based systems because their migration from a mainframe to Windows went wrong. While Microsoft customers were applying these patches and fixes, the software giant launched updated versions of its Messenger client -- which now includes multimedia features -- and gave handheld operating system a facelift and name change, from Pocket PC to Windows Mobile 2003 Software for Pocket PC.
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