Software keeps misbehavin' Complaints about misbehaving Quicken and TurboTax software keep pouring in, along with theories about what’s behind the mess. So far readers are split between Intuit’s less-than-stellar coding skills and a nefarious scheme by a large Northwest software company with a vested interest in hobbling its competitors. I’m betting more on ineptitude than intrigue.Where’s Gopher? Taking “offshoring” to its logical limit, entrepreneurs David Cook and Roger Green announced plans to buy an old cruise ship, park it just outside U.S. territorial waters, and stock it with 600 software engineers. They hope this Love Boat for geeks will circumvent visa hassles for foreign-born engineers and help tech execs avoid that 22-hour flight from SFO to Bangalore. When not coding, engineers can play shuffleboard or go for romantic moonlit strolls. No word on whether they’ve hired Captain Stubing as pilot.Delisting? Delovely. SCO has avoided getting booted off Nasdaq by finally filing its 2004 paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Fans of SCO Court TV are still waiting for the firm to file evidence in its suit against IBM. However, there’s no truth to the rumor that CEO Darl McBride is taking SCO’s engineering team on an extended sea cruise. Totally Spies: What do you get when you mix a brand-new hard drive with a fresh install of Windows XP Pro? A dozen pieces of spyware. That’s what reader Steven C. found when he scanned his hard drive with Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware after the install. The spies were Windows Registry entries for Alexa, a Web-tracking tool tied into IE’s Related Links feature. Microsoft killed Related Links in Service Pack 2, shortly before releasing its own anti-spyware package. A coincidence, I’m sure.Update This: Cringesters are awash in bogus e-mails that claim to be reminders to run Windows Update but end up installing malware on their systems. In other words, users are being nagged by “Microsoft” to install software that turns their systems into zombies under someone else’s control. Sounds like a typical day at the office to me.Got hot tips or cool conspiracy theories? Send them to cringe@infoworld.com and you may get a top-secret bag in return. DatabasesTechnology Industry