I just ran across another bit of damage that Microsoft has spread to the net - the NTLM http proxy scheme. There are standards in this area, and then there's what MS is doing. We should have VW support for this crap shortly, but there's no good reason that we should have to. I love this commentary from another person who had to try and figure this out:

Note that this scheme is not as secure as Digest and some other schemes; it is slightly better than the Basic authentication scheme, however.

Also note that this scheme is not an http authentication scheme - it's a connection authentication scheme which happens to (mis-)use http status codes and headers (and even those incorrectly).

Sigh....