Why don't you consider a sort of a point sytsem, like Amazon or has for instance where ranchers can vote up or down a particular post and the post can get 'hidden' depending on the number of thumbs down or up for this particular forum? I think if you let a particular topic reach a certain number of posts, people will feel some unfairness when you suddenly lock it. Either close it from the get go(it was quite easy to predict from the very first post where the windows vs. other OS was going to set into motion) or then acknowledge that it is just MD and allow it to grow no matter what kind of crap people are saying. Reading your reason for closing the windows
thread even I was a bit confused. Was is closed because it had meaning? or was it closed because it was being injected with meaningless crapp where people were trying to have a meaningful discussion?