From poking around some support forums, it looks like the beta versions of IE8 would not function properly if you had certain non-default options in your boot.ini file. I'm guessing that in the RC, they tried to fix this by rewriting the boot.ini to a default state. Perhaps this process failed due to non-default permissions on that file.

I am not sure what you are disagreeing with here. If the result is people's machines not booting, surely something must have gone wrong, and it can't be a bloggers mistake. Unless you think that the thousands of smart geeks are intentionally crippling the machines (it's not a bug, it's a feature!)

Remember however,that the worst architectural decisions (coupling windows + IE?) have been taken for business purposes. Legacy and bad management can and does wipe out the benefits of legions of smart programmers.