Years have passed, yet detritus from the business fantasy era now known as The Late 1990s continue to wash up on news beaches.

Remember Iridium? Executives of its original backer, Motorola, probably hope everyone would forget about it, yet Iridium continues to make headlines almost three and a half years after the business went bankrupt: "Motorola Settles Iridium Litigation" read the headline near the bottom of the Wall Street Journal Online's main news page yesterday.

For that matter, satellite phone technology in general -- the butt of jokes even before the technology bubble burst -- has been a hot topic ever since Sept. 11. Turns out Iridium, Globalstar and their ilk do have a market outside of mountain climbers and Siberian explorers: disaster/rescue personnel, the U.S. Department of Defense, and, most notably, terrorists and self-styled freedom fighters. Osama bin Laden had to talk to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed somehow.

Still, the backwash of tech mania ought to have mostly receded by now. How many times can business news outlets bemoan insane greed? Analysts lied or were incompetent, brokerages were corrupt and stocks were overvalued -- we get the point.

Or maybe we don't. Tech stocks are still the most heavily-traded stocks on the market, and carry some of the highest price-to-earnings ratios. And echoes from the '90s continue to reverberate in the media. This week's biggest business headline grabber was an investment banker who hadn't pulled off a significant deal in years, but the National Association of Securities Dealers didn't get around to filing charges against former tech banking kingpin Frank Quattrone until now. "NASD Charges Quattrone With 'Spinning' IPO Shares," was the Journal's big news on Thursday, coming on the heels of "CSFB's Frank Quattrone Leaves Firm Amid Probe," "Quattrone May Be Barred From Securities Business," and "How a String of E-Mail Came To Haunt CSFB, Star Banker," from three of the previous four business days.

Quattrone enjoyed a immense reputation in the dot-com era because of his ability to take fledgling tech and Internet companies public, though he arguably led only two truly important initial public offerings: Amazon.com and Netscape. As for the rest -- no one can reasonably dispute that Quattrone and his investment bankers put a lot of junky stock into investors' hands.

Regulators have been looking into the work of Quattrone and Credit Suisse First Boston for the past few years, but he hasn't been charged with any crimes yet; the NASD's action is a civil case. Whatever the specific charges against Quattrone will be -- if there are any at all -- they'll ultimately rest on two points: he manipulated research reports to pump up stock offerings underwritten by CS First Boston; and he made sure important clients got shares of hot IPOs.

The first action may be a crime, but it should be noted that institutional money managers -- and they're the main clients for brokerage research -- already knew about the divided allegiances of investment banks' analysts. For that matter, so did most business reporters and more than a few individual investors. In the post-Milken era, distrust of Wall Street was rampant, and even at the height of the bubble in 1999 and 2000, discount brokerages such as Charles Schwab and Ameritrade portrayed themselves as a democratic alternative to a game rigged and controlled by traditional Wall Street firms (Nevermind the fact that the brokerage had their own agenda -- trade commissions -- which had nothing to do with making you rich)

No one cares about conflicts of interest if their stocks make money, a subject which leads back to the second point cited against Quattrone: he made sure his rich clients profited from hot IPOs. Giving preferential treatment to lucrative (or potentially lucrative) clients is an accepted practice in any other industry, so why should it be a crime on Wall Street? Critics call them bribes, but favored IPO allocations aren't any dirtier than zero-percent financing, volume discounts, free gifts with purchase or any other incentive used to lure business. If you can provide millions of dollars in investment banking business, it's not unreasonable to expect something in return.

Was CSFB aiding market manipulation by giving IPO shares to funds that would instantly "flip" them for a quick profit? Only to a point -- the practice did drive up shares, but it never would have taken hold in the first place if investors hadn't followed their greed. No one was forced to pay hundreds of dollars for first-day shares of money-losing shells like VA Linux, whose CSFB-led offering set a record by soaring more 1,066 percent on its first day in December 1999.

That doesn't excuse Quattrone's actions entirely. There is something sleazy about turning analysts into marketers, even if most people were aware of it all along. More disturbing is the fact that his team made millions for themselves and their employer by destroying wealth, transferring billions of dollars into companies that had no good reason to exist.

Investment bankers -- and CSFB isn't alone in this -- often took advantage of naive entrepreneurs, or at least fanned unrealistic expectations. VA Linux founder Larry Augustin seemed like a sincere fellow when he took his company public, genuinely in awe of his stock's performance and desperate to run away from comparisons to the previous one-day record holder, TheGlobe.com, a company that was little more than a set of personal Web sites. Augustin's company, unlike TheGlobe.com, so far has avoided being delisted from the Nasdaq, barely: VA Software (the "Linux" was replaced with "Software" two years after the IPO) since May 22 has traded at an average price of 99 cents, and broken the $1 barrier just often enough to avoid triggering a Nasdaq rule that automatically makes any stock a candidate for delisting if it trades below $1 for 30 days in a row.

While VA Linux, a company that never should have gone public, struggles along, Quattrone and his team have continued in their jobs, and even now, there doesn't seem to be a strong legal reason to remove them. Some clueless individuals may not have known that analyst research couldn't be trusted, but those are the kinds of people who would be snookered no matter what laws and regulations are in place. Conflict of interest concerns weren't new in the late '90s -- by the time the Internet boom hit the markets, analysts were already required to list their investment banking relationships at the end of research reports.

It just so happens that no one read those disclaimers, just as almost no one does now. In an e-mail last week, a Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE viewer going by the name of Volley Goodman described the exercise as dull and pointless:

"Please stop asking these suits from Wall Street firms to stop announcing every child in their family that holds the stocks they recommend. They make a mockery of the intended use of the disclosure, and they lied and they will lie again. Stop boring us and making any sort of honesty seem ridiculous when they rattle off "a niece of mine owns Microsoft" ... Really! Doesn't everyone get the point that regulation is useless? It would better if we got a run down on the record of their recommendations -- most of which I would bet are useless."

In other words: Just tell us how their picks did.

The mantra of the '90s lives on: We don't care about corruption. Give us stocks. From that viewpoint, CS First Boston wasn't snookering people so much as simply feeding demand. People wanted the next Microsoft, and Quattrone's coterie of analysts told them what they wanted to hear.

And it's not just easy hindsight talking to say that Quattrone's researchers issued a lot of baloney. Anyone who bothered to study prospectuses and income statements could have seen the weaknesses of these IPOs before they were foisted on the public. The information was freely available back then -- in some ways, easier to find than it is now. And if you didn't have the time or wherewithal to do research, then you shouldn't have been buying IPOs in the first place.

That was true long before Quattrone rose to prominence. If Wall Street is lucky, his public flogging -- justified or not -- might finally close the book on The Bubble and its remnants, and let investors move on.

-- Sergio G. Non is the online editor of Wall $treet Week with FORTUNE.