When the news of a system killing virus/trojan for Windows first hit just before the tech world took a holiday in light of the American Thanksgiving long weekend I was reluctant to comment on it. The whole uproar over what was being called The Black Screen of Death and reportedly affected all versions of Windows from XP onward just didn’t pass the sniff test in my opinion.

Not everyone in the tech blogosphere however felt the same way as it became the hot topic over the weekend with much condemnation being piled on Microsoft for not doing anything immediately to address and fix the problem.

Now just to give you the short story on this back on Friday November 27 some unknown security company called Prevx came out with a post on their company blog with the highly charged title Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

The back story here was that the company had discovered that Microsoft was releasing a security patch that when applied could result in catastrophic crashes on Windows PCs. Of course they had a fix for the problem that was now being broadcast far and wide by supposedly reputable tech blogs like PC World.

There was only one problem with this – it was all bullshit.

While my good friend Sean P. Aune over at StarterTech.com was one of the few tech bloggers who was questioning the whole story as it gained momentum it wasn’t until Ed Bott decided to do what no-one else was doing – he started checking the facts.

In his post he provides a pretty comprehensive listing of the major tech blog headlines and a timeline of events as the bullshit story unfolded that ended up with Prevx issuing a formal retraction.

Finally, on Tuesday evening, Prevx backs down completely from the story, publishing a formal retraction and apologizing to Microsoft. Another follow-up post the next day from Prevx CEO and CTO Mel Morris tries to deny any responsibility for the damage. He includes this hilarious bit of understatement: “Regrettably, it is clear that our original blog post has been taken out of context and may have caused an inconvenience for Microsoft.”

While Ed’s interest was more around the obvious bad reporting of the story I think this is yet another example of Microsoft always being painted as the villain even before anyone checks the facts. Oh and like Ed I am not linking to Prevx or their posts regarding this.

You’ll notice I didn’t link to any of the Prevx blog posts or IDG headlines in the account above. Here’s why: Doing so increases the rank of those pages on search engines and makes those inaccurate headlines and summaries even more likely to bubble to the top of a search for troubleshooting information on Windows.

The end result of this is that the so-called Black Screen of Death doesn’t exist; or at least not in a way that is the fault of Microsoft.