Not only that, once they finally get it right it'll get phased out for their latest framework so you can keep on paying the Microsoft tax.
My biggest beef with them is that they chose to make money not through technical excellence but usually through more subversive means.
What sort of development are you doing in 2005? I never had much of a stability problem until doing stuff with WPF under VS2008.
What's keeping you from upgrading to VS2008 or VS2010 and targeting the 2.0 framework?
You are obviously not referring to Visual Studio 2005 here. It is a half-baked unstable mess, that I still have to use every day. It's the Vista of IDEs.
Microsoft also has a tendency to release frameworks before they are stable, or well thought through. They do usually get things right after a few versions, but the unfortunate people who build and maintain software built on the original idea are left stranded.