Chinese President Hu Jintao kicked off his trip to the United States on Tuesday with a visit to Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash., and dinner at the home of Bill Gates, the company’s chairman and chief software architect. During his visit to Microsoft’s campus, Hu assured Gates that China is committed to protecting intellectual property rights, China’s state-run media reported. He also told Gates that China welcomed further investment from Microsoft.[I find it interesting that he visited Bill Gates before visiting President Bush.–Ed.]

Microsoft has decided to continue indefinitely a free development tool offer it launched last year to better attract hobbyists and students to Microsoft’s software. The company said Visual Studio 2005 Express will be free permanently. When it was released for the first time, last November, Microsoft had said it would be free for a year. The software giant also detailed a number of partnerships to provide informational resources, including snippets of source code, to nonprofessional developers.

A Michigan man was awarded $133 million by a Texas jury in a patent dispute against Microsoft and Autodesk, a spokeswoman for Microsoft said. Microsoft was ordered to pay $115 million, and Autodesk was required to pay $18 million to David Colvin, the founder of z4 Technologies, who sued the two software companies in federal court, claiming they appropriated two of his antipiracy software patents with Microsoft’s Office and Windows XP and Autodesk’s AutoCad programs, the spokeswoman said.

Moshe Lichtman, the man responsible for Microsoft’s television division, has stepped down and will be replaced by Enrique Rodriguez, who comes from the company’s Xbox division. Lichtman is returning to Israel for family reasons but will remain with the company, a Microsoft representative said. Specifics about his new position were not disclosed.

Intel is investing in Vietnam and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is due to visit this weekend, but the poor Southeast Asian country’s IT industry has a long way to go. Business analysts say that for the second time in a decade an array of foreign industries and services, including IT firms, have an eye on Vietnam’s highly literate, young workforce.

Users have been urged to upgrade to the latest versions of Mozilla’s software to protect themselves from a series of critical security holes. The Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned that earlier versions of Firefox, and other Mozilla software based on Firefox code, contain a clutch of vulnerabilities that expose users to attack. The Mozilla Foundation released a new version of Firefox last week, version 1.5.0.2, which it said contained fixes for several security flaws.

A U.S. judge has quashed Microsoft’s attempts to obtain documents in its antitrust battle against the European Commission, ruling the software giant was trying to undermine European Union law. District Court Judge Mark Wolf in Boston rejected Microsoft’s attempts to subpoena sensitive information from Novell, which provided information to the European Commission for use in an antitrust case against the Redmond firm.

An appeals court on Tuesday upheld a ruling that Microsoft can’t be sued for antitrust violations under federal law by consumers and businesses who did not buy their software directly from the company. Microsoft has already agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle a number of class-action suits brought under state laws. Tuesday’s ruling doesn’t affect those cases, but does prevent a nationwide class-action suit under federal law from moving forward. The suit largely covered purchases of Windows made in the mid-to late-1990s, as well as application software such as Word and Excel.

With the recent release of the Team Foundation Server component of its Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Microsoft bolstered its effort to take its mass market software story into the enterprise, and the company says this is only the first step. Rick LaPlante, general manager of Visual Studio Team System, said, "This is a mass market approach–We go to customers and we talk to them about this mass market play, this mass market price point, this mass market ease of use."

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service says that Symantec owes $900 million in back taxes related to its acquisition of Veritas Software. Symantec said it strongly believes that the IRS’s positions are inconsistent with applicable tax law and existing regulations, and that it will petition the tax court to protest the assessment.