AFAIK, if you get with MS and get with their licensing program, you have to buy an MS OS for every computer you install, and the OS agreement with MS says you can upgrade (or downgrade) it whenever you want. You still have to buy the OS from your PC manufacturer. That way when MS come out with Win7, you don't have to buy new licenses for everyone, all you have to do is buy a MS OS. I've recently researched this for my company, and if you're buying individual MS Office licenses (or windows cals + exchange cals + sharepoint cals), you're crazy. Get with MS, they have a yearly agreement you make with them. Once a year, you count how many employees you have, you write MS a big check, and you're done with it. You could hire 1000 new employees, and you can install whatever you want, no charge. They could work for 3 months, you could fire them, and you don't pay for them. Only after the 1 year agreement is over, you have to sign a new contract, and pay the fees again. It's cheaper and easier to maintain then keeping track of them one at a time. You also get free upgrades whenever a new version comes out, so it's simple on that front. It also has some accounting advantages (Is a one-year license a capital expense? Will you save money by it not being a capital expense? Consult your local accounting department/tax advisor, you might save 20% or so. It's also fewer things for accounting to keep track of.) http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/contact-us.aspx United States Call (800) 426-9400 M-F, 6 AM - 5:30 PM Pacific, or find an authorized reseller. Canada Call the Microsoft Resource Centre at (877) 568-2495 YEESH. I sound like a MS guy. I promise I'm not.

My guess is that the issues are more about the software requiring bug-specific behaviors. I had an opportunity to speak with one of the OS people a long time ago, they said that "Long Ago" Lotus 1-2-3 had a nasty habit of writing to files after Lotus told the OS to close the file handle. In the older versions of the OS, the OS didn't check to see if you were writing to a closed file handle, and wrote to the closed file. Then you update to the latest version of DOS, and all the sudden it breaks Lotus because now the OS cleans up after itself and correctly returns an error when you try writing to the closed file handle (which is probably ignored by Lotus, causing the save file to be corrupted somehow). Now who do you blame? MS for not getting the API right in the first place, or Lotus 1-2-3 for writing to the closed file handle, or MS fixing a bug? From what I remember, MS ended up adding code to detect that the application was Lotus and switching into a quirks kind of mode. Having to write fixes for all these crappy applications is why Windows is a POS. More towards the issues with drivers. A friend of mine's printer driver broke with XP SP2. We found out that how the printer driver worked was it has a service that hosted an application that spoke to the printer, and the driver spoke to the local application via TCP. MS firewall blocked it (cause open ports can expose vulnerabilities). I blame the printer company for writing a crappy 50meg printer driver that requires a network connection to print locally, not MS.