How many banks run propritary and commerical sensitive applications under windows?

Plenty, in this country anyway. They used to run OS/2 on (some) of their ATMs, but I'm pretty sure that they will have moved over to NT for those. I once gave a training course in Smalltalk V/PM to the developers at one of the big 4 banks. And I know from my sister who worked in one of them, that many of the front-of-house and machine room applications ran on NT/2000-based workstations.

At one time, (almost) every application that ran on any small system--workstation, server or mini-class--was developed in-house. The banks were large scale, in-house, IT developers. The logic isn't complicated. If the only software your system runs (besides the OS), is developed in-house, it makes it much harder to penetrate and crack as the bad guys have nothing to practice on. Whether this is still true I am not sure. My (scant) inside information dried up when my sister took a lucrative golden handshake and moved on several years ago, but I seriously doubt much has changed. If anyone on the inside today know better, I'm open to correction on this.

Of course, the large scale applications at the DP centres still run on big iron, but at the branch level, there are many functions that require local processing before consolidated data is uploaded to the DP centers.

I'll say it again. With appropriate configuration, most of which is not even particularly hard to do, or find references telling you how, all the NT-based versions of Windows are perfectly capable of being secured. The astonishing thing (to me), is that, despite all the bad press it has garnered MS, successive OEM distributions have been shipped in a default-open rather than a default-closed mode of operation. Some will attribute this to MS simply not caring, others to a lack of programming competance, but neither of these hold true for me.

My pet conspiracy theory is that there is circumstantial evidence for "external influences" involved here. The thing you have to ask yourself is who benefited most from open doors onto the harddisks of 90% of the worlds (private, commercial and governmental) PCs? And who has the expertise, knowledge, money and infrastructural capacity to exploit them for commercial and military advantage?

If you buy that, the next question to ask yourself is, if the forthcoming release of Windows is going to be secure, what would remove the external influence to allow that to be the case?

Google are rapidly becoming the central clearing house for the world's surfing habits, email, porn collections and even the contents of people's hard disks. They are also powerless to resist external pressure to supply information to certain government departments. Is the timing coincidental?

I do not believe in coincidences.