The lack of IPv6 literal address support in the version of wininet.dll
that shipped with Windows XP was for reasons of engineering
expediency,
in other words, MS deliberately shipped a broken product.
I do, however, also remember a discussion on one of the IPv6 mailing
lists about this, and it seemed that there were several members of the
IPv6 community at large who thought it was great that we weren't
currently supporting them. Apparently there are those who think
hard-coding IP addresses (of any version) in URLs is a bad idea.
yes, there are those who think that it's desirable to force all apps to
suffer the delays and unreliability of DNS every time a connection is
established. they are deluded.
Keith