*claps* Thank god almighty for you folks.
I swear, one of my biggest pet peeves back on RolePlayerGuild (especially when i GMed) was that very very few players seemed to understand the purpose and importance of their history, often throwing in whatever they wanted and not even thinking about whether or not it made sense with the rest of the character sheet (especially the personality section).
History/Bio/Background is probably the most important part of a character for me, and if i can't come up with an interesting story to tell about them, I'll usually ditch an character i started working on because they just won;t really seem worth it to me.
the few exceptions are when I'm in a really battle-centric rp and what I'm excited is more a new concept for a weapon or power that i thought up of, and the character is just a vessel for me to test out that concept. Like i said though, those are very rare occurrences, and even most of my characters that start out as vessels for powers/weapons end up being fully fleshed out and given a proper history after enough time has passed.
I guess this is a side-effect of my love or world building (or it might be the other way around, i'm honestly not sure). When I world build, everything has to make sense in my head, everything has to feel organic and integrated. If two countries heat each other, i need to figure out why, and then think about how their hate and history might affect neighbouring countries and their cultures, economies, etc. even if 70% of that information might never come up as relevant in the rp/story/whatever that i;m creating. It needs to feel like an organic, living world in m head before i can present even a part of it to anyone else, let alone an rp group.
I guess i view characters the same way (or, again, it might be that I treat my worlds like characters, it's a confusing chicken/egg scenario for me ^^;), every part of their character needs to be explained by something else about them or their circumstances, and the history section is the best way for me to illustrate how the characters can make sense.