The European Commission is challenging big-and-bad Microsoft again, announcing yesterday the launch of two new probes into possible anti-trust activity undertaken by the software giant.

As in the slew of like lawsuits filed with commissions all over the world against Microsoft, the latest complaints to be investigated involve interoperability - specifically, the lack of it - in Microsoft product. An industry group, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, alleges that Office business applications and the .Net language are unfairly blocked from competitor interoperability, while Microsoft Explorer, Windows, and Internet Explorer are under fire due to software company Opera's complaint about their unbreakable bundled state.

Last September, the European Court of First Instance upheld an EC decision of March 2004, ordering Microsoft "to share confidential networking protocols with rivals and to offer a version of Windows without a built-in copy of the audio and video Media Player." Oh, and the fine on that one was approximately $613 million. EU authorities have fined Microsoft to the tune of EUR 777.5 million since 2004, but as of September, not a eurocent had been paid thanks to incessant appeals.

At about the same time as the court upheld the 2004 anti-trust complaint, computer security firms McAfee and Symantec sought to take Microsoft to task over its seemingly anticompetitive behavior regarding the then-unreleased Windows Vista software. Microsoft had resisted pressure from McAfee, Symantec and European Union authorities to release certain information necessary to security programs from within the Vista operating system.

Antivirus software maker Symantec filed complaint with EU regulators that Microsoft was trying to undercut software rivals with Vista's embedded virus-killer, while McAfee representatives publicly accused Microsoft of - insidiously enough - incorporating security programming within Vista that is impossible to disable.

Ran a full-page ad taken by McAfee in the Guardian, in part: "Microsoft seems to envision a world in which one giant company not only controls the systems that drive most of the computers around the world, but also the security that protects those computers from viruses and other online threats."