Microsoft is failing to move quickly enough to comply with its antitrust settlement with the government, the Bush administration said in its strongest show of impatience with the company since they reached their agreement in 2001.

In a court filing yesterday, Justice Department lawyers said Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is falling behind on providing technical information mandated by the settlement.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, who is overseeing the settlement, in October questioned the pace of Microsoft’s efforts to develop tools to help competitors create software that runs smoothly on the Windows operating system. A month later, she said the company, the world’s largest software maker, was making progress and seemed to be “back on track.”

In its latest court papers, the Justice Department said the company has fallen “significantly behind” in answering technical questions about its software. The administration hadn’t previously complained that Microsoft is moving too slowly to fulfill its obligations under the settlement.

The company “needs to dramatically increase the resources devoted to responding” to the government’s concerns, the court papers said.

A Microsoft spokesman, Jack Evans, said in an e-mail that “Microsoft is working hard to resolve the concerns raised” by the government and is committed to “expend whatever resources are necessary to address these issues.”

The antitrust settlement was reached after a federal judge and appeals court ruled the company illegally protected its monopoly for the Windows operating system that runs about 95% of the world’s personal computers.

Microsoft said in October that its “Troika” project, designed to ensure that competitors’ programs can run on Windows without glitches, won’t be ready until October 2006, nine months behind schedule. The government and the company expressed optimism in November that, by splitting the project into two parts, testing can start as early as next month.

The company, which will offer 500 hours of free product support to help licensees learn to use the new tools, must submit monthly reports on its progress. The last such submission was made to Judge Kollar-Kotelly on January 16, and the judge set February 8 for the next status report on the case.

Shares of Microsoft fell 6 cents to close at $26.35 in composite trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. They have advanced 2.8% in the last year.