eM can do anything eM wants to do. The market will decide whether bugs in your product are acceptable. You can blame Microsoft, or you can find a workaround.
These are all really excellent points. Use of IE is particularly challenging to just “work around”. The rendering engine would be extremely difficult to replicate and likely present more issues than not. I feel somewhat guilty for starting thus thread, but I didn’t realize it would start this kind of negative commentary. I think eM Client is a really good client and one cannot expect every product to be perfect. And while the ESC key thing is an annoyance, I really have learned to just not hit escape. 
So while I’d like it to be fixed, it’s definitely reasonable to allow the company time to try to find a solution and, if necessary, wait on Microsoft to fix its bug. Definitely, we should not ask them to throw out the core rendering engine over this minor annoyance.
“The rendering engine would be extremely difficult to replicate”
–nobody suggested that, except the eM employee. Replicating IE is not the only alternative, you could use Amaya, Blink, Gecko, KHTML, Presto, Tasman, or WebKit.
Or, keep using Trident (the IE engine) and write some custom code that fixes the issue.
I’m a Microsoft Certified dot net programmer. I’ve encountered bugs in Microsoft products. But i don’t tell my customers “sorry, it’s Microsoft’s fault”-- the customer doesn’t care. They just want a product that works. if there’s a Microsoft bug, then i write custom code that fixes or works around it.
“I feel somewhat guilty for starting thus thread”
–i don’t think you should feel guilty about reporting a bug in a paid product. It’s not “negative”, it’s just reasonable feedback. That’s why this forum exists.
"eM Client is a really good client:
–i agree, it’s my favorite email client, paid or free.
“it’s definitely reasonable to allow the company time to try to find a solution”
–i agree! And the market will decide how much time.
“we should not ask them to throw out the core rendering engine”
–who’s asking for that?
i think it’s not appropriate for tech support people to get all hurt and defensive when users report bugs.
did you read my comment, that IE 11 is not available for Windows 8?
this does not happen very often, and the ghost image always goes away after a couple minutes. i consider it very low-priority.
here is my praise for eM!
Thank you for your support
Jan