I don't care whether the patent was valid or not. ActiveX was a crime against humanity, and they need to be punished, preferably eternally.

...a crime may well have been committed; if employees of the university filed for a patent whilst knowing there was prior art (and if it was by one of their own students they are going to have a hard time arguing they didn't know about it) then haven't the signatories to the patent application have committed fraud?

I suppose it would depend how Wei released viola. Part of course/project work => belongs to UC. Done in own time as a personal project -> I think it belongs to him. If it was part of course/project work and therefore belonged to UC then can the prior art argument be used at all, seeing as they themselves owned it (by extenstion)?

This is doubtful at best.

M$ came in late on the Internet so if they do have a patent it would have been though acquisition.

The University of California system has ten campuses with over 200,000 active students and over 1.4 million alumni. Unless the prior art was turned in as a major assignment, there's not really any reason for the Regents of the university system to have ever even heard of the project.

Microsoft is not above manufacturing evidence if it thinks it will help with it's court cases.

Remember the manufactured demonstrations from the IE-Bundling lawsuit(s) ?