On the whole, I agree that they
should make their system more standards compatible and not reliant on proprietary MS desktop components. But we are where we are for now... and with the stats cited above there just isn't enough pressure to make this change quickly with what we might regard as relatively "unenlightened" software vendors!
You seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to get Opera to work... is this because you don't want to
download MS IE6 or because you are running or Linux or some other desktop? In which case, have you tried to use
Mozilla? I'd assume it would have similar problems.
For sure MS are starting to lose their iron-clad grip on the desktop, recently citing Linux as their greatest threat (and not only on the desktop!) and so eventually the world will catch up with the more open and standards based approach. But the popularity of MS existing products means that there isn't enough pressure on vendors as yet to always support the more open alternatives.
I understand what has been said that a re-write of the web-UI to be totally cross-browser and standards compliant would be a major task: a suggestion would be to put up an a simple "text only" style web-UI with static rather than popup links to the key menu items. Would be pretty quick to add, surely: we're talking about what, twenty odd links and a small maintenance overhead?
Hope this helps!
Andy