Why computers are hard to use for common people

Let me start by saying I have made my entire career programming, managing and in general working with computers. However, I am not a Windows Messenger user in general. However, today I was using it and I was looking at some of the options and was presented with the following screen:

I found this exceedingly odd, as I could not for the life of me determine what the heck allowing the acceptance of ink would do for me. It wasn't even something that seemed even remotely logical.
My other evidence is the following screen that I seem to get all of the time when running Windows Internet Exploder.
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If I was a normal person, I can't imagine I would find this a reasonable error. This screen is so verbose, it makes me want to just shut off the computer every time I see it. I can't help but think of some grandmotherly type trying to look something up and getting this message simply saying: "The InterNet is down!" While computers have certainly become commonplace - I think we all need to do a better job of making them more useful and easier to use. There have been great strides, but there is still a long way to go.