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Blame this altogether more sinister portrait of Decker as narcotized, philandering spy on her increasingly messy divorce, which involves a custody battle over her children. The accusations are mentioned in a September 29 letter we've obtained, sent to Decker's legal team from the San Francisco attorneys representing her husband (Click here to read the eight-page letter) .

Notice of the breakup first surfaced nearly two years ago. There didn't seem much reason to believe the parting was especially bitter. Though Decker led a series of power grabs at Yahoo, elevating herself from CFO to president and would-be CEO, her divorce generated little such noise. Divorcing couples tend to fight over money, but in April 2008 it emerged that Decker's husband Michael Dovey was not seeking alimony; he told people he was independently wealthy.

But an increasingly contentious court battle has nevertheless erupted, judging from the September 29 letter. The attorney for Dovey references hearings and letters attempting to resolve how to handle discovery, the early legal phase in which evidence is collected.

Dovey's legal team is using discovery, in part, to collect evidence concerning Decker's purported and unspecified "accusations about" her husband — including personal emails Decker may have sent referencing his conduct, "state of mind and/or mental or physical well being," according to the letter.

Some of this material may reside on old Yahoo computers, and Decker's legal team is trying to win the ability to selectively block the disclosure to Dovey's legal team of evidence as it emerges, according to the letter. Dovey's team wants much more: all potential evidence not protected by attorney-client privilege or "attorney work product protection," with particularly sensitive material handed over and protected by a confidentiality agreement.

Near the conclusion of the letter, Dovey's attorneys hint at what else they might be looking for in discovery — and what else Decker's attorneys might be trying to keep a lid on:

These sorts of allegations are relatively common in nasty divorces and custody battles and Decker, for many years a fixture of Yahoo's quarterly conference calls with stock analysts, knows how to mount a strong defense in the bright glare of the public spotlight. Still, a woman who quit Yahoo in January and just bought a waterfront home in the San Francisco Bay Area's quiet Marin County can't be happy to be caught in such a maelstrom of mudslinging. Nor, one would venture, can her former colleagues.

We've posted the full eight-page letter here.

Update: Richard Rados, who wrote the letter, declined to comment on the divorce because of "pending litigation" and added, "I don't want to contribute to ill will between" the parties involved. We left a message for Jennifer Wald, Decker's attorney, and will include any comment when/if she gets back to us.

(Top pic: Decker at an "All Hands" company meeting last year. From Yahoo Blog's Flickr account.)

Under former president Sue Decker — whom Bartz swiftly swept out of the company — a swift-moving Silicon Valley startup turned into a glacial global bureaucracy, stacked with a faceless army of disposable vice presidents. Bartz, the new CEO whose blunt speech is laced with four-letter words, is set to flush out the leftovers of Yahoo's lackadaisical leadership. And good riddance!

The cloddishness of the old management team was what made Yahoo's stumbles such a good tale. Back when we were in the business of chronicling every coming and going through Sunnyvale's revolving door, my then-writer Paul Boutin ridiculed my reporting as a running tally of "Yahoo vice presidents you've never heard of, but now they're fired."

Funny because it was true! For example: AllThingsD's Kara Swisher hears that wireless exec Marco Boerries could be on his way out, and has been spending a lot of time on "family issues." We'll translate that from Swisher's overly polite prose: He's going through a messy divorce, and has been talking to people at both Google and Facebook, though neither company seems interested in offering the brash mobile entrepreneur a job. Boerries ran mobile as a fiefdom, separate from the rest of the company, and as a result, Yahoo has proven irrelevant in a mobile market that Apple and Google have run away with.

If you hadn't heard of Boerries before you learned his job was at risk, don't worry — Yahoo has dozens more like him. And they will soon be on the job market — with "getting fired by Carol Bartz" as their most notable accomplishment.

Bartz (left) will soon have to take stock of the fact that Decker (right), for all her talents in finance, has long been a burden on the company. The former Wall Street analyst took the company's CFO job in 2001 as a temporary post, a stopover point on her way to a Silicon Valley CEO job. In that role, Decker starved its search business of funds, anxious to preserve Yahoo's profit margins and thereby please investors. But she did so at the precise moment when Google began its meteoric rise.

To sate her personal ambitions, she engineered a reorganization that drove out her chief rival, COO Dan Rosensweig, and then led a palace coup to drive out Hollywood movie mogul Terry Semel as CEO. (It's said that the misplaced kindness of founder Jerry Yang has been the main factor keeping her on the job; she filed for divorce in 2007, and Yang has been loathe to add professional troubles to her personal woes.)

Bartz, as a new CEO, can ill afford to keep such a schemer on board. But Decker is not a stranger to her; they both serve on the board of Intel. And the last thing Yahoo needs is more drama. So Decker's exit, I suspect, will be quiet and graceful, as such things go. But she would be ill-advised to fight for her job. Bartz, when she took over as the CEO of Autodesk, a maker of computer-aided design software, simultaneously fought a quarrelsome founder and breast cancer. She is much tougher, in short, than Rosensweig, Semel, or Yang. And as a woman, she will have no worries of charges of sexism in discarding Decker. It is the first thing she needs to do at Yahoo, and the best way to show her steel.

Updated: Steely indeed. Decker is "resigning."

(Photo of Decker by AP)

A ludicrously patchy trial balloon lifted off this week, airing the notion that Microsoft might fund some kind of complex buyout of Yahoo, at a knockdown price of $20 billion — less than half what Microsoft offered last February. It was swiftly shot down: If Microsoft wanted to get its hands on Yahoo, why would it loan someone else the money to buy it?

Another tall tale is making the rounds: that Sue Decker, Yahoo's president, is still a candidate to replace founder Jerry Yang, who's stepping down from the CEO job after a disastrous year and a half. (Anyone care to bet on whether one of the "sources familiar with the search" who told CNET News that Decker was a contender was Decker herself?)

Decker, a former investment banker, wrecked her credibility with Wall Street through overoptimistic forecasts. Never a strong manager, she similarly killed whatever loyalty Yahoos had left for her through her mistreatment of key underlings. (She had Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's former U.S. sales chief, locked out of her office over the weekend when Millard told Decker she was planning to leave — and only months later thought to invite Millard to a farewell party, which Millard refused to attend.)

What Decker has going for her: She's already in place, and is a known quantity. If Yahoo's CEO search utterly fails to find an outside candidate and doesn't settle on a board member, Decker is the board's only option. John Chapple, a board member who was previously CEO of Nextel Partners, has said he's no longer interested. One of the outside possibilities, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, has reportedly dropped out. Another, former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, has yet to express any enthusiasm. But what does it matter that you have a known quantity, when you have taken that quantity's measure and found it lacking? Insiders whisper that Yang, Yahoo's dithering founder, is loyal to a fault, and that's the only reason Decker has not been fired.

If Yahoo ends up with no choice but Decker, it will surely spell the end of the company. What options will she have, other than to sell it at a cut-rate price to Microsoft?

How depressing for a company once worth more than $100 billion, which promised to bridge Hollywood and Silicon Valley and dominate new media. It still has formidable assets, and valuable businesses. Why does no one know what to do with them?

There are, nevertheless, some possibilities.

One is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has been toying with entering politics. eBay and Yahoo have long flirted with a merger, so she's reasonably familiar with the company, and with the challenges of running a large Internet company.

A similar candidate: Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, who is now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture-capital firm. Money is tight in venture capital, and Velocity has yet to raise a promised new fund in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars it had planned for when he joined it. Yet Miller has a problem: Time Warner, the parent of AOL, used his noncompete agreement to prevent him from joining Yahoo's board; it's not clear why they would waive it to let him become CEO. The agreement does not expire until next spring.

News Corp. COO Peter Chernin does not seem to have much hope of succeeding Rupert Murdoch as CEO, who is expected to hand the media conglomerate over to one of his children instead. But he does not have a credible claim for having much online experience — overseeing MySpace is the best he can do there.

And lastly, as a courtesy, Yahoo's president, Sue Decker, is under consideration. Some say Decker's Machiavellian maneuverings helped out former Hollywood studio boss Terry Semel as CEO last summer. But she's seen inside and outside the company as a bad manager who lacks a vision for what Yahoo should be.

More:

• 5 reasons why Jerry Yang is done at Yahoo
• Jerry Yang's goodbye letter to Yahoo
• Yahoos quietly cheer Yang's exit
• Newsweek reporter: Yahoo PR "lying sacks of s—-"

I'm not a Valleywag regular but felt compelled to write after Blake & Sue's latest cost-cutting shenanigans.

After filling up my salad box as usual, I head over to the cashier to pay my usual 4.25, a fair price for a smallish-medium salad whose cost is supposedly company subsidised (that's what they told me when I joined a few months ago). Today, however, I had to put my take out box on a scale since Yahoo is charging by weight now. So my 4.25 salad cost me $7.75 (I was an idiot for using the dense ranch dressing). What an excellent way to further kill morale during such trying times at the company. Best of all, Management decided to keep this secret from employees! They could have mentioned it at the all hands but they're spineless bitches who couldn't even take the issue of the cafe head-on.

I never thought a management team could be so stupid to strip away these perks that increase productivity when there are many larger costs that can be cut first. After this, it wouldn't be surprising for them to stop offering coffee or charging for the water. Luckily they're not charging people to use the bathroom as the $.50/flush proposal got nixed at the last board meeting (although the proposal may be revisited at any time).

Anyway, I just needed to rant because I cannot believe a firm would be so stupid to cut back on perks that improve productivity while wasting money on shit like a Halloween party and a bunch of banners touting the greatness of Yahoo around the Sunnyvale campus (and the door props...gimme a break). Not to mention the killer haloween party. And chauferring Sue in from the North Bay each time she comes in. Gosh this place IS as bad as the stuff you read!

Decker's first victim was Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo's COO. As CFO, Decker orchestrated a reorganization, behind Rosensweig's back, which effectively demoted him. Rather than accept this, Rosensweig quit, leaving a big hole in Yahoo's product organization which Decker has yet to fill.

Yet she managed to blame the ensuing chaos on CEO Terry Semel, who soon followed Rosensweig out the door. Suddenly Yang, Yahoo's hapless founder, was CEO, with Decker as president.

So will the third time be the charm? Decker never wanted to be Yahoo's CFO; she was talked into the job as a way station to a CEO job in Silicon Valley. She certainly has the political skills to land the job. But does she have the operational skills to do something with it? As an ex-CFO, Decker would be the first to admit, in private, that the numbers speak for themselves.

Google is getting higher bids than Yahoo! today, because advertisers perceive that Google is delivering more value–more targeted leads, more clicks, and more conversions. An advertiser might be willing to bid more for a click on Google than for a click on Yahoo!–the belief that the advertiser will get more value from Google. The core idea is limited use of Google ads to deliver more value from our search results pages and other inventory in circumstances where we aren’t delivering the best advertiser value today.

Translation: Yahoo will import Google ads on keywords where Google ads can provide more "value" to advertisers. These advertisers may pay more when they get more value, but that's just happy coincidence for Yahoo. Even simpler: Yahoo will "have the ability to see whose ads are priced higher — Yahoo's or Google's — and then decide which ads to serve."

Likening APT (née AMP, née Project Apex, before its name was "awesomeized"), Yahoo's too-little-too-late ad platform, to the scotch-soaked, cigarette hazy halcyon days that Hamm's presence would evoke can only remind those potential ad buyers of how the business really isn't anymore. Like Yahoo's golden era, it, too, has passed, no matter how many smoke rings management attempts to wreath their current missteps in. As Don Draper said in his most famous pitch, clipped above: "Nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound."

"Insights" is a Valley term for analytical marketing — taking the vast amounts of data generated by users' Web activity, and acting on that information. This used to be the realm of Usama Fayyad, Yahoo's now-departed chief data officer. With the departure of traditional brand marketer Cammie Dunaway, and the ascension of Colella, I'm begining to see a pattern. Decker is trying to replace art with science — marketing by the numbers.

It's a shift Decker has already made in Yahoo's sales department, starting with the disgraceful forced departure of respected ad-sales chief Wenda Harris MIllard, a botched exit which is still talked about on Madison Avenue. Millard, now at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, has loudly defended the role of art in the sales process, the notion that human intelligence can sometimes better match advertiser and audience than an automated exchange.

Decker and Colella may have an easier time automating Yahoo's marketing efforts, though. Pop quiz: What does Yahoo's brand mean? Right. When you're starting with a blank slate, painting by numbers may be the easiest solution.

Yahoo acquired the 80 percent of online-advertising exchange Right Media it didn't already own for $680 million in 2007 — a jawdroppingly high sum which made former Right Media executive Brian O'Kelley giggle, since Yahoo had bought the first 20 percent at a $200 million valuation only months before.

If Yahoo executives think they overpaid, no one's holding it against Walrath. The acquisition is the centerpiece of Yahoo's strategy to turn the company into a central place for buying online advertising. Transforming Yahoo's ad-selling operations from a conventional salesforce which sold ads on Yahoo's websites to a marketplace where banners are traded like bushels of corn has been a particular obsession of Decker's.

Adman Scott Symonds, whose employer, whose AKQA agency brings clients to Yahoo's advertising, told us he hopes the rumor of Walrath's promotion is true: "Yahoo has made some integration moves, but I think Yahoo can be even more aggressive leveraging these network properties and exchanges they purchased." One Yahoo speculates that Walrath's move to headquarters could be bad news for Mark Morrissey, another SVP in charge of advertising product management. Judging by how Walrath coolly handles a dancing, singing, rapping man in a chicken suit in the video embedded below, he's well prepared for life at 701 1st Ave, Sunnyvale, Calif.:

Decker is hoping, in other words, that advertisers will simply hand Yahoo their online-advertising budgets and trust it to place ads. Google already does this with its auction-sold search ads — and advertisers are furious about how their ads get placed willy-nilly by the hubristic search engine's secret algorithms. Here's how to use the word in cocktail-party chatter: "Yahoo's advertising strategy is nonguaranteed to succeed." (Photo by John Battelle)

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg strikes us as more concerned with her personal PR than with the boring but important operational problems she was hired to solve. Yahoo president Sue Decker can be as Machiavellian as any guy, but her boneheaded reorgs are responsible for much of the company's current straits. Greene was one of the few women leaders in the Valley who seemed worthy of out-and-out admiration. That she was ousted by a jealous man makes the absence of her equals all the more glaring.

• Former Fox Interactive boss Ross Levinsohn and AOL CEO Jon Miller, now partners at Velocity Interactive, seem to come as a pair. Levinsohn is best known for acquiring MySpace for Fox Interactive and quitting the company after it wouldn't buy Digg. But Levinsohn is also known for bullying entrepreneurs — once, so badly that renowned angel investor Ron Conway reportedly "flew off the handle" at him. In some quarters and in Jason Calacanis's heart, Miller gets credit turning around AOL. But like any exec, Miller has his detractors at AOL and they came out of the woodwork when he was fired last year. One described him as
  

  An executive over 4 years that put more incompetent people in high-places (e.g., McKinley) while firing (Govern) and letting reams of talented folks (e.g., Kotay, list-o-long) leave that were passionate and—at least—somewhat competent, and were actually trying to foster some core innovation and synergy.

• OpenTable’s CEO Jeff Jordan is on Yahoo shareholders and board members' wishlist, just like he was on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's list to become COO of that company before it settled on Sheryl Sandberg. An eBay veteran, Jordan was thought to be in line for Meg Whitman's job until he took over as OpenTable's CEO in 2007. His reputation as a "product Nazi" led Valleywag to endorse him for Yahoo's top job way back in November 2006.
• Tim Armstrong heads up Google's ad sales force and the unit is perhaps respectably profitable enough for Yahoo shareholders and board members to include him on their list. We wonder, however, if the board knows about Armstrong's involvement with sketchy search engine spam company Associated Content.
• Why wouldn't Yahoo's board and shareholders want Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson for the company's top job? Ever since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a bid to acquire the company on February 1, no one's given more thought to running Yahoo. Johnson's even written several memos on the topic — showing great ability to include exclamation marks after the company's name while still respecting the need for capital letters.

In fact, since details of Decker's plan leaked last week, Yang has little to say about them at all except to insist that Patel get the gig. This despite vocal protests presumably similar to the one we got from commenter bluepurple:

I'm appalled a the above comments implying that Ash is even remotely qualified. In my time he was focused on looking the part of an executive. Flashy car - check, Steve Jobs uniform - check, ridiculously expensive watch - check. He's unable to inspire, is a terribly unfocused speaker, and had no concept of how to execute. His teams were mostly shuffling around throwing out words like "platform" and "innovation". He was a non-factor at Yahoo. Placing Ash (who was not part of Weiner's team) in such a large role is clearly Sue seizing control of the entire company. Ash is just a stand in.