We love a salacious story as much as the next Microsoft muckraker. But when the tale is patently wrong – as in claims that Microsoft is going to rewrite 60 percent of Vista but still launch the product in January 2007 – we need to come to the defense of the Redmond software maker. Vista still needs a lot of fixing and testing, as Microsoft itself acknowledged last week by delaying the release-to-manufacturing date. But, for better or worse, the product is feature-complete. Microsoft's Xbox team is denying that Xbox programmers are being reassigned to the Vista rewrite project. And former Softie (and now Google employee) Marc Lucovsky, who was one of the key architects on Windows, also denies the plausibility of the rewrite story.