I myself can't understand this kind of reasoning from the EU. IE doesn't "compete" against "competitors" whose browsers are all free anyway. The EU seems to have gone insane. It's a bit like threatening oxfam with legal action for being more successful at giving stuff away than another charity. Or am I missing the point?
(And btw, I don't work for Microsoft.)
In Windows 7 we are already seeing the disappearance of several nice apps in terms of being "in the box", and some apps are simply going to be downloaded immediately by a lot of users straight away.
In the past Microsoft was in some circumstances quite good at frustrating those users who preferred to use other people's web browsers, but even though I dislike that, I can understand it, putting my developer's hat on. As a developer, it's awkward if people start phoning you up to complain about bugs in your product when they are actually bugs in components written by someone else. And so using alternate browser's engines to provide critical bits of Windows functionality isn't on.
An earlier poster mentioned windows update. A very good point, this is why Vista has made Windows update into more of a proper dedicated vista application rather than just a flaky badly lashed-together heap of junk trying to live inside a normal web browser. (I presume that Vista's win update UI is an XAML-powered app so uses that for a UI rendering engine rather than the rendering engine in any web browser.)
There has to be a limit to people's whinging. People really who don't like IE that much perhaps should buy another o/s, as there are a couple of others out there that some people seem to like. If someone doesn't like IE because they don't trust it, then it's odd that they are willing to trust other microsoft software so much that they would be willing to buy an o/s from the same company.
Microsoft have behaved very badly in the past, and I would be count myself as both a fan and vehement critic. But it's ludicrous that the legislators have nothing better to do than make end users' lives more complicated in gesture politics which make no practical difference. And they are doing this when MS has finally been persuaded by pressure groups (of which there have been many, WASP is one that comes to mind) and do something about sorting out the issues of user choice surrounding the web browsing experience, has come up with a new product that heads some way towards the state of the art in some areas of web standards compliance, and after being dismally bad in terms of security has already some while back advanced to be undeniably light years ahead of all the browser competitors on the Windows Vista platform in terms of security with the exploitation of low-rights/"protected mode".
No seriously, I have never been a Microsoft employee. Rather the opposite in fact.