Question: What comes in a blue and white box with a can of Raid? Answer: Windows 2000.
Or at least it should if there's anything at all to the controversy that has erupted about it.

According to an article published in Sm(a)rtReseller magazine, an internal memo was issued at Microsoft saying that the company needs to fix 63,000 "known" bugs, or defects, found in the final release of the product.

Now I don't know what kind of effect this would have on you, but it would make me think twice about parting with $500 of my hard-earned cash to have the latest and greatest of the Windows operating systems.

Yes, I realize that I climbed aboard the Win2000 bandwagon a couple of weeks ago, telling people who use older versions of NT to run to their nearest supplier to get a copy. But that may not be such good advice after all. It sounds as if you might be wiser to watch from the sidelines than to run to the store.

According to the magazine, the memo, issued by Windows development leader Marc Lucovsky, says 28,000 of these defects are "likely to be 'real' problems."

And that, folks, would mean the situation wouldn't lend itself to a simple fix that could be handled with a downloadable maintenance release or service pack, the route that was taken when Microsoft found bugs in NT 4.0 and Windows 98. This looks like it could be a full-blown catastrophe.

Keith White, director of Windows marketing at Microsoft, while not disputing the memo, said that it was meant strictly as a "motiva tional statement" for the Windows development team.

He told the folks at Computer World Magazine that the memo was based on a scan of source

code with a tool known as Prefix. This analyzed 10 million lines of test code that wasn't included in the final release. It flagged code that could be made more efficient.

White also insisted that Win2000 has been put through the paces by 750,000 beta testers and security analysts and that the "claims are taken out of context and are completely inaccurate."

"Our customers, analysts and technical reviewers say this product is rock solid," he said. "This is the most reliable version of Windows ever."

Even so, my advice now is to wait, if you can, for the release of the first or second service pack, which should contain a lot of the critical bug fixes.

Or wait for the next release of Win2000, which, according to the memo, is expected to be bug-free.

Of course any new release is ex pected to have some problems, even though many software compa nies won't admit it. And it's proba bly to Microsoft's credit that the company has a thorough-enough testing process to uncover these problems.

But the fact remains that - if there's any merit to the memo - Windows 2000 really isn't ready for prime time.