Vista Revealed to be Suit of Bats.

Princeton University researchers today announced that Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system is nothing but a suit full of bats.

“We were examining the code to find weaknesses in the new DRM [digital rights management] system… um, mostly so we could cheese Microsoft and the RIAA off.. and we discovered that there was no there there,” said Professor Ed Felton.

When Felton and graduate students working closely with him looked behind a closed Vista window, they first saw a shadowy form they assumed to be Vista’s underlying code. On further decompiling, however, the form collapsed into a suit full of bats which flew shrieking away from the computer, escaping over the Internet.

“Nosferatu takes many forms,” Felton said. “Our close work in examining the music and film industry has revealed many of them, including the bag of mice, the box of insects, and former MPAA head Jack Valenti – who, interestingly enough, turns out to be voles operating a marionette.

“Kinda… creepy.”

Further evidence that Vista is simply a suit of bats came during a press conference with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, together in a rare appearance at Vista’s launch in New York. When a reporter innocently produced a boxed copy of Tiger to ask if it was the model for Vista, the large X – a cross – on the cover, caused Gates to shriek, emit noxious fumes, and sink into the stage, disappearing from view.

Ballmer, meanwhile, began wailing, “Master, oh Master!” and then ate several cockroaches. The Microsoft CEO was put in a straitjacket and incarcerated in a padded room in the Bellevue Mental Asylum in New York.

Felton said, “The accidental unearthing of an ancient evil was certainly only slightly beyond our expectations. We had hoped to find a timing error that revealed encryption keys, but a suit of bats confirms our worst fears.”

Felton then threw on a cassock, grabbed a vial of water that had dripped from the cooling system of a Linux box, and summoned his students, striding forward into the night.

The Federal Trade Commission said that while consumers who purchase Vista may be unhappy to receive an operating system that contains a suit of bats, the licensing agreement clearly states “Microsoft warrants Vista contains a suit of bats,” and thus returns cannot be forced under federal law.