Stilly -

One of the reasons I'd been looking for a "policy" was because I'd also heard rumors about some help for people who got ripped off; but the only "rumors with possibly valid source" came from people where their webmasters worked the deal. This implies that they were on a "volume license" which quite likely would be different than for individual buyers. It was rather frustrating to be looking intentionally, and not finding anything - but you sort of get used to it when you deal with Microsoft.

There is a slightly "different deal" for volume licenses, both with respect to help for counterfeits and for "transportability" of a licensed copy from one machine to another - but it was a pretty long road to find anything specific about individual users. It's still a crap-shoot as to whether a particular individual will get help; but at least there's a contact point.

Maybe the long search was one of the reasons I thought I'd found something new...

John