I am with you bloom. As far as I am concerned this W2K purchase I made will be the last MS OS I will ever buy. Once support for it goes bye-bye, then so does all my MS OS's. What they are doing is pure and simple extortion.
I did a little test when they officially stopped support on W95. I downloaded MS 5.5 on a W95 system and went to the update site and got a promt, "we no longer support the OS". Well, there are many updates to MS 5.5, but they will not let W95 users get them.
I can understand stoppping the support for a 5 year old product, but not the applications that are running on it, especially when they are MS based and less than 2 years old.
Yep,...they have pretty much burned any bridge they have with me. Wait until all these XP guys start to try to upgrade thier hradware only to find they have to pay MS $200.00 bucks for an OS upgrade as well.