US ISP EarthLink yesterday confirmed it has begun legal action against Internet appliance and ultra-cheap PC vendor Microworkz. The move follows last week's suspension of the contract between the two companies. Then, EarthLink said it had severed the deal because Microworkz had allegedly breached the terms of the contract. EarthLink refused to specify what Microworkz had done to provoke its ire, but yesterday it emerged the vendor had yet to pay what it owed the ISP for bundling Net access. Microworkz immediately went on the defensive -- the company told US newswires it was planning to file a countersuit alleging it's business was hurt by EarthLink. It claims EarthLink's software is faulty, and that the ISP didn't correctly teach Microworkz' technical staff about getting it up and running on the computer it was being bundled with. That, claimed Microworkz, "slowed shipping of WEBzter machines to a crawl". ®