Although 1 in 5 bugs logged to Microsoft's semi-public database of Windows Vista problems haven't yet been fixed, a Windows developer and consultant who analyzed the listing said Friday that his research showed the company was quickly addressing bugs as they were submitted.

Robert McLaws, who hosts the Longhorn Blogs site, fed the nearly 28,000 bug reports from the Connect site's database -- open only to Microsoft-chosen beta testers -- into Excel. Of the 27,479 bugs (as of July 3), 5,743 remained classified as "open." The remainder had either been tagged as "closed" or "resolved."

"They have a lot of them fixed," said McLaws, "and of the ones which haven't been fixed, most are [from the] Beta 2 timeframe." According to his accounting, only about 250 of the unfixed bugs are over two months old. (For reference, Microsoft released Vista Beta 2 in a public preview a month ago.)

"Based on the numbers [of bugs] closed, it really does look like they're pushing for quality," McLaws added. "It proves that they're doing a good job."

But McLaws admitted that his analysis was based on incomplete data. Bug status information from the database is limited, he said, and wouldn't let him determine the number of duplicates or those not reproducible.