The dates in this thread are all 2006--but I'm really surprised you're only discovering this now, John. You're usually the first to comment on this stuff, but this authentication process has been around for more than a year.

I was in New York City last summer helping a friend with his computer. He's a bona fide Luddite, and through phone calls and email I've talked him through lots of fixes and such. When he bought this computer a couple of years ago I gave him a laundry list of what he needed. He should have gone to a store like CompUSA and just bought one with all of these features, but he had a computer store in the neighborhood make one for him. When I got my hands on it last summer I first thing updated everything in preparation for installing Ghost and an external hard drive to back it up--he may not know how it works but he has information vital to the work he does in it.

I hit that Microsoft authentication wall and realized that the techs at the neighborhood store had put in a pirated version. He could have kept using the bad version, but it would have gotten further and further out of date and less able to support new software. Tom didn't qualify for a full free version, but he did get it at half-price. We had to answer questions about where he got it, receipt information, etc. and then purchase the new version while using that computer. I had to use my credit card (he doesn't have one in this post-Sept. 11 world as he gets back on his feet) so they shipped it to me (have to mail it to the owner of the card) and I shipped it back to him and a friend helped him install it.

That business is out of business, so they evidently were busted earlier by Microsoft. It's a pain in the backside to have to go through all of that, but I could only set up automatic updates if he had an authentic version, and he is one user who needs it to happen automatically because he'll never do it himself.

SRS