Stark is a bazillionare.  His parents were not gunned down. 

He has no reason to be a hero, and yet he is.  Best superhero ever!!

The freak accident that injured Stark in the first place
was from the same sort of weaponry that he himself
had been creating and selling to the military, right?
**

So ypou would have a problem with anyone who worked in the defense industry, even the military I would imagine?

Tony Stark may lack (or seem to lack) people skills from time to time, but he had a change of heart (irony?) when his own was injured. He created a suit of armor to save himself and escape capture-- then continued using it when he realized that he had larger responsibilities to the world.

In short, he might act like a jerk from time to time but his heart has always been in the right place. He didn't have power thrust upon him; he created the powers he uses. What's less than noble about that?

(Weird coincidence: post 2020, a year well known for... Iron Man 2020! Arno Stark, techno-villain extraordinaire.)

Andrew W. Farago: He's got no money problems.

Wrong.  He lost his entire fortune and lived on the streets for an extended period of time.  When he first started Stark Enterprises, he had to take out a loan to keep his company afloat because he'd invested every penny he had at the time just to get the company up and running. Currently, he doesn't have enough money to rebuild Avengers mansion.  Yeah, he's still got more cash than you or I, but that's a different story.

Andrew W. Farago: he's good-looking enough to pick up any woman he wants pretty much at will and discards all of them pretty quickly, too

Wrong.  Bethany Cabe first appeared in IRON MAN #117 and was his girlfriend until she left to take care of her estranged husband in IRON MAN #153.  And she even came back a few times and it was quite obvious that Tony still had deep feelings for her.

Andrew W. Farago: he's his own boss and doesn't really have to answer to anyone unless he feels like it

Yeah.  So?  Tell me you wouldn't like to have that power.

Andrew W. Farago: and he spent the early years of his career figuring out the best ways to blow up random Vietnamese citizens.

Wrong.  Give me some issue numbers where Tony was blowing up random Vietnamese citizens.  He was a military contractor, designing weapons for the military to use against enemy soldiers, not random citizens.  And, in later years, feeling guilty over even that, he stopped producing munitions for the government.

Andrew W. Farago: In the years that I've been reading about the character, he's turned on his teammates multiple times to varying degrees (lying to them, murdering them, and betraying them come to mind)

During the Armor Wars, Tony did indeed lie to his teammates, and admitted that he felt terrible about it, but also felt it was his responsibility to contain his own technology at whatever cost.  To go back to the point of the previous statement further up above, the guilt over the many innocent people that might have been harmed by others using his technology drove him to drastic measures.

Andrew W. Farago: he invented a flying wheelchair and a cure for paralysis and didn't make any real efforts to make them available to the general public

Wrong.  IRON MAN #251, page 8.  The scene is at the newly opened Stark Prosthetics facility, where Curtis Carr (formerly the villain Chemistro) has just shown James Rhodes his new prosthetic leg and is now showing Tony and Rhodey around the place, and he says, "When Tony called and told me he wanted to create a research center for pursuing technologies to aid the physically challenged, I had no idea that he had this kind of commitment to the project."  Then, Carr goes on to explain that Tony's anti-grav chair could be a boon to thousands of the disabled, but the problem is getting the per unit cost down to considerably less than the 2.7 million dollars Tony paid for his.

As for the cure for paralysis, well, that didn't turn out so good in the end, did it? The bio-chip in his spine caused extensive nervous system damage and eventually killed him.

I know none of this probably makes you like the character of Tony Stark more than before, but at least make an effort to know what you're talking about.

All that cool stuff, and yet not one good ongoing Iron Man series.  I don't know why I bother to read anything.

A fantastic friggin' character going to waste.

Andrew W. Farago: Considering that Spider-Man was on a non-step guilt trip for decades over the death of one person, it seemed a little odd to me that Stark never seemed to put much thought into how many people his technology killed.

He did.  After he got out of the munitions business he fought tooth and nail with S.H.I.E.L.D. because they still wanted him to make weapons for them.  Nick Fury went so far as to attempt a hostile takeover of Stark International, but Tony Stark won out in the end (see IRON MAN #129 for details).  And, after the events of the Armor Wars, what he had done haunted him for some time, and he had to work hard to rebuild some of the relationships he'd strained.

Andrew W. Farago: Maybe the right creative team could get me to actually like the character, but he's been more like a cross between Donald Trump and Donald Rumsfeld for the past 25 years than the young Howard Hughes-type character he was when he was first created.

I won't go back so far as 25 years, but the last ten have been mostly crappy characterizations, I'll give you that without a fight.  But, that Howard Hughes-type character you say you might like if he was portrayed that way was the one that created munitions for the military, and weren't you just complaining about that a few lines up?

Andrew Bitner: (Weird coincidence: post 2020, a year well known for... Iron Man 2020! Arno Stark, techno-villain extraordinaire.)

I wouldn't really consider him a villain, though.  If you haven't read it yet, check out the IRON MAN 2020 one-shot by Walt Simonson and Bob Wiacek for a more fleshed-out characterization of Arno.  Great story!

I find the line of reasoning that demands our heroes have a real-world (in the MU or DCU) impact on their surroundings by virtue of what they do (scientist, doctor, etc.) patently absurd.  Andrew, do you wonder why Reed Richards can create all those wonderful toys, yet hasn't done a thing with them to improve an MU that suspiciously looks the same as our non-superhero world?  How about Hank Pym?  How about Peter Parker?  Do you find them "unlikeable" because they haven't applied their superior intellect, having invented things too numerous to mention, to helping their fellow man?  Or can we accept that these are comic books with the convention being that if we don't want their world to look light years ahead of our own, thus robbing the reader of that identification, then we have to separate the tech they create (hover-chairs, ways to stop heart degeneration, etc.) from it's possible real world application?  I'm really curious why that particular story beat is a sticking point for you.

I'm also curious why you flippantly describe Tony as a man almost eager to find ways to kill non-combatants (which he has never been)

QUOTE: ...and he spent the early years of his career figuring out the best ways to blow up random Vietnamese citizens.

...and then back peddle to say that what you really meant was that you felt a "little strange" he didn't abandon it altogether when he returned from Vietnam.  Two things: 1) It doesn't automatically make him unlikeable, nor a callous man, to be creating what he did during a time a war.  It's only a fairly recent, cynical outlook that would paint every person who creates weapons to defend their country out to be an unlikeable character, 2) yes, those same weapons caused himself great harm, but at the hands of a villain.  That he returned to the US and became a hero, instead of wiping his brow with the thought that he was lucky while sipping champagne, bedding every woman he met and figuring out a way to spend his millions, speaks a lot about the character to me.