You can generalize this observation to a lot of Microsoft's decisions: a problem exists, so they solve it in a nifty way, a way that makes everything else harder or more error prone. An example: byte order mark. That sure does solve the problem of UTF-16 and UTF-32 byte order determination. It makes every other use of what should be a stream of bytes or words much harder. Concatenate two files? Gotta check for the BOM on both files. Now every app has to look at the first bytes of every "text" file it opens to decide what to do. Suddenly, "text" files have become interpreted, and thus open to allowing security vulnerabilities.