The (WGA) Nightmare is Over…I Hope!

The sun is shining! The drapes have been thrown open! And like old Ebenezer, I’m just about ready to burst forth in song! It’s Christmas morning, and I’m alive! Alive!

Er…OK, so it’s not exactly Christmas yet. And no, my name is not Scrooge. But after hearing the news about WGA – that Microsoft is eliminating the dreaded Windows Vista “kill switch” (a.k.a. “Reduced Functionality Mode”) as of SP1 – I can certainly relate to the old miser’s state of mind. After all, like Mr. Scrooge, I had my own near death experience, only it was WGA – and not the “ghost of Christmas yet to come” – that led my spirit…er, OS…towards an untimely grave.

The question now is: Will they really fix all of the possible “kill switch” scenarios? In my case, the WGA “false positive” didn’t just result in reduced functionality – it literally disabled the system. In fact, the only thing that would run was a single instance of IE, and the only web page it would load was the “Get Genuine” anti-piracy site. It took several boots into the “rescue console” and some extensive fiddling with bcdedit to get WGA to back-off, and to this day I’m still not sure what set it off in the first place..

So here’s hoping that Microsoft that Microsoft has indeed learned its lesson and disabled the “kill switch,” in its many ghastly incarnations, for good!

Microsoft Challenge Update

So far, no response from Microsoft regarding my challenge to explain their baseless and misleading allegations against my OfficeBench test script. Typical!