Installing and upgrading help

Yeah, well I sometimes dedicate too much of my life to these kinds of discussions.

1. What precipitated my response was the statement "...but spend public money?..." which seems to imply that there are moral reasons against anyone selecting (and spending money on) Windows as a platform, regardless of circumstances. It was a cheap shot, for those of us who don't have options. I must admit, sometimes I can just walk through the chorus of "Why aren't you on Linux?" postings, and sometimes they just become annoying, especially when I have a problem to solve. The TCO argument probably was unnecessary, thrown in just 'cause of how many times our school district has discovered that "free is often way too expensive."
2. Yes, Windows is less stable, and solving problems caused by the nexus of commercial and open-source platforms can be tricky. Hence my remark above, "...I would agree to the general tenor of the discussion here,.." Of course, we did manage to solve the problems you've found here (some, like the email issue, solved themselves), hence my current remarks, and my recent lack of participation in this community. But anyone who thinks there's only one right answer to everything is living somewhere else besides earth.
3. One thing you don't get from my profile is that I am not a server geek. I'm a certified high school math teacher turned tech resource teacher who decided a while ago that online learning management was important to our 40,000-student PK-12 district's educational growth. I decided I'd rather be an ignorant support person than cede those needs to free tools on the cloud (the only other option I have), and it's been quite a ride. I do have some technical issues I've personally solved, but sometimes all I can give in the Moodle community here is encouragement and shot-in-the-dark ideas.
4. And, again, that means I'm completely beholden to our district IT staff, who are generally Microsoft certified technicians. They (and I) won't be learning Linux any time soon...wish I had the time, but I don't.

As an aside, my state's public education system is one of the biggest Microsoft "clouds" out there. The state Department of Education currently uses Live@EDU to host our email and cloud storage (that's for every adult AND child in the state education system), and we're moving to Office365 next month. There are lots of moral, ethical, fiscal, and use issues we could discuss ad nauseum there, but these decisions are made about 50 levels above me, so it would be completely moot.

As for "...If Windows is that great, there must be plenty of Windows people around to help..." I'm not sure this forum is a good test, since proprietary platforms are not well supported (or well liked) here. Well, duh! There are probably LOTS of Windows Server users out there who don't participate here.

I really do appreciate the Open Source international community, and participate in it when I can. Our district runs Moodle, Mahara, and Wordpress, three platforms coming from this movement. But I can tell you that the technicians in my district do not participate much, besides Google-searching it. Not because it would not be of benefit, but because their workday is 99% proprietary. When big tech problems happen in that world, there's a phone number they call.

This is neither right nor wrong, it just is.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled tech forum...