Microsoft patents Operating System Shutdown

Specifically they're patenting graceful shutdown of a graphical windowing environment, with a series of prompts to ask the user if they are sure that they want to terminate processes that cannot be gracefully stopped.<p>All of it seems blindingly obvious, but then it also doesn't look like a claim against any non-Windows OS would last 10 seconds in a court, as there are a ton of clearly Windows-specific claims.

So did they <i>file</i> this patent, or were they <i>awarded</i> this patent? I'm not familiar enough with patent terminology to tease this info out of the article.

The flowchart seems to describe the current Windows 7 shutdown sequence. As much as I hate to say it: if this is so obvious, why hasn't any other operating system implemented it?

As a patent on a process instead of on an actual product, how does this kind of patent tend to fare in the courts?

Pity that they're incapable of actually implementing this properly.

That's all right. Using my Mac I rarely have to anyway... and really wonder if I even need to.