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Despite endless speculation and prediction-mongering that Windows 7 will be released this fall, Microsoft has stubbornly held on to the official suggestion that Win7 won’t ship until January 2010.

But now PC manufacturer Acer — in what must be a wild violation of its nondisclosure agreement with Microsoft — is saying not only that Windows 7 isn’t destined for a January release, but that it will arrive officially this October. October 23, to be exact.

That date makes a whole lot of sense for Microsoft, as it gets Windows 7 on shelves and preloaded on new PCs before the holiday season gets underway — before Halloween, even — and gives consumers enough time to be bombarded with promotion before Black Friday arrives five weeks later. It’s a smarter release window, in my opinion, than waiting until late November or even December, since it also gives consumers the chance to get comfortable with the OS (and hopefully read some glowing reviews) before it’s time to make a purchase.

An October release also avoids the need for the complicated upgrade offers that Microsoft often bundles with machines that are sold right before a new OS comes out. Those upgrades, in part, got Microsoft slapped with a class-action lawsuit when it let vendors put “Windows Vista Capable” stickers on machines sold during the 2006 holiday season in advance of the release of Vista in early 2007. Many consumers found they had trouble with those upgrades (and discovered that the computers weren’t as “capable” as they’d been led to believe) and sued for damages — though currently that case has lost its class-action status.

Why won’t Microsoft fess up about the Windows 7 release date? Several reasons: First, it doesn’t want you to wait to buy a new machine or a copy of Vista, and it knows from history that announcing the release date for the next generation of a product too early can kill revenues until that date arrives. The other reason: October 23 is a long way off, and anything can happen in the next six months, and history again teaches us that Microsoft never meets its release date schedules.