[Fyron]

Current machine upgrades have never been a big source of profit for MS. Most of their OS sales come from licenses on brand new PCs. It doesn't make any sense for MS to kill XP activation prematurely. Doing so will not sell more copies of Vista; manufacturers selling PCs are what will sell more copies of Vista.

The vast majority of computer owners have never installed an OS, and never will. You don't even need to run WPA when you first run Windows on a new machine (at least, for laptops from Dell); most people have never even used WPA in the first place. The very small subset of people that have installed OSes is very much intersected by the subset that can install a hack to bypass WPA. Killing XP activation prematurely provides no financial benefit whatsoever to Microsoft. Nada, zilch.

Don't use DRM as a boogeyman like some trade groups use piracy... it doesn't help your argument.

Your quote from the FAQ even supports my point that MS wouldn't arbitrarily and prematurely stop activating new installations of XP... Again, the end of XP's lifecycle is at least 5 years after they stop selling licenses for it. Even if they don't provide an update to remove WPA, we are at a minimum 6 years from that point. How many new installations of XP will there be in 6 years?