Hi Chris, thanks for the linkage and glad you liked the post. There's a followup wherein I claim that IT department meddling is sometimes indistinguishable from a denial-of-service attack.

Something about the posts and comments referenced there is mildly disturbing to me. Perhaps it's the god complex that some of the posters seem to have, wherin they seem to think that because they're a knowledge worker that they actually know how to secure their custom Windows box properly for connection to the Internet.

In my experience, for every programmer or DBA that knows how to be a competent sysadmin (on any OS), there are another four to six who end up screwing things up for everyone else on the network due to ego or sloth in place of due care.

That leads us to the real reason for standardization of installs in any rational shop. It's necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) to enable quick rebuilds and return to productive work when the inevitable bad things happen.