Ok, so what functionality does one exactly lose ? I mentioned being locked out because that's what I remember reading a while ago - that this is how it was supposed to work. If that's changed in the meantime, my bad. However, even if it doesn't completely lock you out, my point still stands, since you lose functionality that you bought and paid for; you didn't buy half an OS, or a crippled OS - so, as I said, I think my point stands.

And if it wasn't clear (and perhaps it wasn't), my point is that this proves several things:
- an aggressive approach to treat a legal customer is (surprise!) yet again proved not-so-good
- yet another example of idiotic copy protections who only hurt the legal customer, and do not affect people using pirated versions in the slightest
- how lovely it is to have a piece of software that phones home for every tiny little thing, and disables functionality in case it detects something wrong...
- also yet another proof of how bad monopolies are - if M$ didn't have 95% of the OS market, does anybody believe they would have even put out an OS with these "features" ?

And, Husar, looks to me like you felt that I was somehow blaming you for something, or being aggressive towards you... I wasn't - you, as opposed to most people, are rather tech-savvy and you make your choices knowing what you're getting into.
Also, while you may have XP, as I suspect most techie people do, non-geeks are stuck with what the big manufacturers offer as the pre-installed OS...