715, I wish I knew the answer to that question, as it is a concern of mine as well. My guess is that what M$ will do is simply make all copyright protected media files only playable on the computer which recorded or downloaded them. That would be the simplest thing to do. The RIAA's main concern is file-sharing, and this approach would kill that as well. Microsoft has a lot of very powerful companies forcing them to do this. (Primarily Disney, AOL Time Warner, the RIAA, and Sony are the ones crafting legislation through Senator Fritz Hollings and a Senator from California who's name I can't remember at the moment.) I choose not to use any Microsoft product which forces this upon me without my approval.
I also don't like the thought of Microsoft being able to automatically install updates on my computer, which I use for software and hardware development work. The system needs to be stable and I can't have my operating system changing itself without my permission. I've been trying really hard to do all of my development work under Linux as of late. The only program I still must run under Windows is Pcad.
"Set programs access and defaults" doesn't disable anything. All it does is remove the links to the executable from the desktop and start menu. It just hides the desktop and start menu links to the program. You can still launch the programs by clicking the executable. Millions of tax dollars have been spent fighting Microsoft in court and all we've gained from it is the ability to automatically delete some links from the desktop. I could do that myself, without Microsoft wasting hard drive space on a neat little utility to do it for me. Microsoft has, if anything, became even more monopolistic since the trial began.
