When i went to watch the local chef's knocking up a curry they had a tin full of melted ghee with honey mixed in Which they paint on naans before shoving em in the tandoor.
Also Pat chapman uses honey in his recipe for do-piaza p112. Curry Club Balti Curry Cookbook.
Ive also seen quite a few uses of honey in a lot of indian recipes when trawling the internet.
I might try it on my naans, i know the ghee adds a lovely sweetness.

I use Avira Antivirus(luke filewalker).
Spybot also, plus Za using its antispyware program, plus the best thing ive used sofar is Deleting IE and installing firefox, also using all of its security features.
All the above are free-ware.
I deleted avg as i caught a virus with it running.
I bought and paid for mcaffee a few years back and similarly caught a vrus with that running.
Norton systemworks is good all round defence.
The worst virus i ever caught was called windows defender or security suite or something, made a real good job of destroying windows xp, much like Chris's comments above, got rid of add/remove and made the os unusable, i had to reformat.
Moosoft the cleaner is a very good free trojun remover.
Of course all of the above are only usable in hindsight if your browser hasn't been hijacked, which is what a good trojun will do.

Or we could try trusting our own judgement, just like say a chef.

Feckin hell in the time it would take you to do that lot you could have enroled in a pottery course, passed and made your own authentic tandoor.

Theres a couple of things you havn't tried that ive noticed on the onion part.
Shallots, sweeter than normal onions but smaller so cook faster and with less oil therefore.
Caramalised onions, take ages to cook but produce an intense sweet onion flavour, that also takes a lot less oil to cook, compared to the usual curry method.
Frozen pre chopped onions from iceland/morrisons seem to fry faster than fresh.
Or and i dont like to say it but, you could always opt for, its hard to say this, smaller portions.
lol.

I understand about the addiction thing with curries and believe, somehow its real, the really worrying thing for me is that it seems to affect the male population a lot more than the female.
I mean yes, sometimes the missus will say" make a curry love", but its not that often, and 99 times out of a hundred im the instigator. And to be honest, what with the missus being a northern bird and only evolutionaryly advanced enough taste wise to find peas pud and gravy with her chips a culinary highlight, i think she only asks for it to get out of cooking for that particular night.

Picking up on the part about the oil not releasing in your base, ive noticed that when simmering a base if the simmer is too ferocious?<spelling?, then the oil seems to keep mixing with the base rather than becoming free enough to rise to to surface.
A slower simmer gives the right results for me.

In Brum i used to buy these Frozen Curries in the single portion metal takeaway containers, yuo could get madras, jalfrezi, vindaloo the usual suspects and they were brilliant, just like the takeaways.
I think they were a couple of quid each and were just the sauce and meat, no rice.
Used to get them from local shops in the freezers, spar and the likes.
They were labelled Mr Daves But ive not seen them for years.
Some ready meals are a good cheap alternative, my mate swears by tesco's or asda's chicken phall, and sometimes you just cant be arsed to do anything other than nuking a plastic bag so why not.
Although tonight i had a spicy curry not poodle, and it was shite!.
You pay your money and you take your chance.

Funnily enough wouldn't we be classed as a Con-Dem-Nation now?

Yeah or ?30 worth of spices/pastes, You'd probably get enough spice to do you in curries for about 6 months lol.