Backwards compatibility. It’s something that many vendors strive for and Microsoft is certainly one that has placed a value on making things backwards compatible for third party software. According to this story at Sci-Tech Today, Symantec thinks this eagerness to be backwards compatible may be a big issue for Vista’s security. They expect several “privilige escalation” vulnerabilities to be found and say that if those such vulnerabilities are discovered in the prompt for user consent…. well essentially all of the systems security precautions could be undermined. The whitepaper on the details talks about several issues that have been patched at this stage in the Vista development process, but the main question is how many are out there?