First of all, the entire phone call took less than 5 minutes. You don't
have to explain; you just say that you have a machine with the symptoms
of "x' and you need hotfix "xxx" per the KB article. The email with the
download link and the password was sent before I got off the phone with
MS. The whole process took perhaps 7 minutes including downloading and
installing the hotfix on the client's machine.

MS doesn't make the hotfixes publicly available because they have not
had wide quality-assurance testing and they don't want just anyone
indiscriminately downloading hotfixes and then turning around and
complaining that their system was hosed.

If you are such a busy and important person that you can't take 7
minutes or less to get something you need, then have your secretary do
it. The amount of time you spent bitching about this in this newsgroup
is more than you would have spent if you had just been a grownup about
this and contacted MS for the hotfix.

*plonk*

Malke