Where were Microsoft's Quality Assurance Team?

Where were QA when they allowed Vista to exist? Why am I stroppy about this?
Dead simple. I run Vista Business workstation on a 2003 domain. I have IE7 installed.
Today I want to access a site to check for client that their site is accessible remotely. Following what the supplier told us to do yesterday to allow Active X controls to install I got nowhere. Whatever I tried, whatever settings in IE I used, I could not get the Active X to install despite being offered the UAC control to specify the administrator and password credentials. This surely should be enough.
However I thought maybe I should log on as the administrator. So I logged off. 20 minutes later I am still waiting for the machine to offer me the log on screen. This includes having done a cold restart. 30 minutes later and after my second cold restart I have got my system back.
Surely logging off as one user and logging on as another is not difficult. Surely it should not require a reboot of the system? Surely we deserve better from the world's leading software developer.
Let hope QA have been awake during the long overdue release of Win7.