Phew ... I can come up for air now.

I have finally got my outlook unread messages down to zero. There are 1229 Messages in my deleted Items folder and 195 messages from the last 2 weeks still in my inbox, but which have been looked at.

Since getting back I've switched over the to Vista RC-1 build I set-up the evening before I went on holiday. I've installed an updated (internal only) version of GroupShot which I mentioned before: this works with Vista and has a couple of interesting new features which are still under wraps. More importantly for work, I've put the technical refresh of Office 2007 beta on my (Vista RC-1) machine. Not surprisingly I 've spent most of the time in Outlook - which seems to use Vista's search now. Somewhere when the builds of Vista and Office got out sync Outlook stopped getting RSS from Internet explorer and started doing it for itself - that's been fixed, too. 

Three items that proved to be  good read in my RSS feeds were:
(1) Mike Calligaro's called I'm just a feature, although Mike writes about Windows Mobile stuff, this really applies to every product and it's a useful reminder getting features into products isn't as easy as you might think.

(2) Steve Riley's "Mandatory integrity control in Windows Vista" which explains how protected mode in Internet Explorer 7 works.

(3) Jeff Jones' "Windows Vista x64 Security – Pt 2 – Patchguard" which explains a lot of the background and itself contains a lot of intesting links (particularly this one from the vista security team)

Thanks to Steve for #2 and 3