That's absolutely the line I take." Microsoft officials welcomed Barrett's appointment. "We look forward to working constructively with him to ensure the company's full compliance with the Commission's decision," said Horacio Gutierrez, associate general counsel for Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash. Earlier this month, Kroes said her department had received new informal complaints about Microsoft, perhaps leading to the opening of a new case. "The monitoring trustee's role is to provide impartial expert advice to the Commission on compliance issues," said the Commission in a statement. EU regulators ruled last year that Microsoft had abused its near-monopoly in desktop computer systems to illegally dominate the media software market and threaten the position of competitors selling office networking software. The Commission fined Microsoft 497 million euros ($599 million) and ordered it to share code with rivals and offer an unbundled version of Windows without the Media Player software.