I agree that moving to Linux would solve many of the problems experienced by Windows, however that won't be an option for the majority of people for a few years yet. With some luck the various Asian and European governments' moves to Linux will speed this up. Right now this looks like the only way to break Microsoft's dominance, unless Apple can pull something off.
While the classic Mac did give everyone root access, you didn't have email programs automatically running viruses when received and you didn't have web browsers with the ability to install software from a website automatically through ActiveX controls. Microsoft has also had more than a few years to tighten security in Windows 2000 and XP, but they didn't. XP is very stable, and 2000 isn't far behind, but that doesn't matter if they can be so easily over run with viruses. Microsoft has had 4 years to fix these problems int the NT series (Windows 2000 and XP are really just NT 5 and 5.1 respectively) but didn't and didn't seem to care about it either.
It does look like someone is either really annoyed with SCO (most of the Unix and Linux communities) or some one is trying to give open source users a bad name. Can't say that I have any sympathy for SCO though.
goates