Microsoft display evilness again.
I have no great problem with Microsoft. Sure, their business practices suck, and their software is buggy and geared towards monopoly. The thing I object is to how they force people to upgrade.
I once bought a joystick, a Microsoft Force FeedBack Pro. With Windows 2000 you cannot "bind" buttons, which is one of it's biggest selling points. This is because the software that does this will bail out because you aren't running Windows 98 (to force people to buy Windows 98). So if you want to use Windows 2000 or Windows XP then you have to buy a Sidewinder ForceFeedback Pro 2, for another £100, just for the CD with the working software.
With my current computer problems I have been forced to install Windows 98 with some dirty hacks to read NTFS partitions in a DOS OS (note: this bypasses any security so is rather dangerous). But, oddly enough Windows 98 wouldn't start. On further investigation it turns out that Windows 98 will not work on computers that run over 2.1GHz. Fair enough, but to get the fix you have to call a premium line to Microsoft to get details. This no doubt will be "buy Windows XP".
IF there is a fix, why not release it? Because they can't make money that way and it can be parsed as Windows 98 being out-dated so it doesn't need a "fix" as such, because it was never designed for it.