Microsoft blamed Yahoo, Yahoo blamed Microsoft.  It was another embarrassing episode for the pair, which had previously conducted a rocky courtship before tying the knot with a big business deal in June 2009.

The incident in question was the mysterious case of "phantom data" usage on the Windows Phone 7 platform.  Microsoft zeroed in on the culprit -- an overactive Yahoo! Mail app.  From there it was off to the blame game races.

But with a patch to its IMAP mail servers, Yahoo has fixed the issue, sparing users battery life and data allotments.

Of course this news will only truly impact those who use the Yahoo! Mail app on their smart phones -- a moderately small group.  Still, putting this embarrassing fight behind them is in the best interest of both companies.

After all, Microsoft has bigger and better things to focus on -- like rolling out its first major Windows Phone 7 update later this month, which will add copy and paste and performance enhancements.  

As for Yahoo, it can now get back to quietly riding off into the sunset of search engine obscurity, as Bing and Google eat up it's remaining market share (though in affect this is zero-gain for Microsoft, as Bing code has already replaced Yahoo's search engine in everything but the name).