DON'T PANIC -- Printed in large, friendly letters

Seriously, this is old news. I've been using Digsby for a few versions now, and knew about this from the beginning. The option to turn it off via the "Support Digsby" dialog has always been there. The very fact of the presence of this "feature" scared me off at first, but the quality of the app won me over in the end.

So no, I'm not a fan of having this be part of Digsby, but at least they disclose it (I'm pretty sure there was a blog post on the Digsby Blog a while back about it, and how to disable it) and allow you to opt out.

Before you jump to that extreme, have you tried running the 64-bit versions of Vista or 7 on your machine? A lot has changed since Vista dropped back in 2006, and compatibility has drastically improved. I'm currently running the Windows 7 RC on two machines, both in 64-bit flavor, and have had no problems thus far with driver or software compatibility. Try downloading a copy of the release candidate and give it a test run, as I think you will find this to be a much simpler and more effective (not to mention much, much faster/better performing) alternative. If you still have problems, then you can jump to virtualization. But even then, consider VirtualPC or VirtualBox on 64-bit 7 running a 32-bit 7 client.

I can see the "Funny" rating, but for the life of me I cannot understand how this can be modded anywhere above zero. Clearly you have never held a real job... or attended any classes at a legitimate school, for that matter. This comment made me feel like this: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2008/09/thestupiditburns.jpg