Next year, you'll have to pay another licensing (rental) fee to Micro$oft to continue using Win XP on your computer, or didn't you know that hidden feature?

Since that isn't true there is simply no reason for anyone to have heard about it :) There has been no indication that this is the case or going to be the case. The license would have had to state such a fact and it simply doesn't.

In other words, this is just a rumor that some folks with a serious paranoia problem seem to be having started.

Well as much as I loathe them, Laurie is right. You only have to pay once for Xp, but you have to ask Microsoft's permission to upgrade your computer...

Well, no, not really. The license also does not grant MS the right to DENY you a WPA code that anyone has shown. The system will want to re-authorize after major sequential upgrades but that is not a "permission" issue, just a technical one.

You can find out more about this here and here.

The one you have to pay the rolling fee's for is the "next step" the Behemoth known as .Net

.Net is a technology family geared to the supplying of technical services. The actual subscription or payment model is not built into the .Net infrastructure. It is not a single product or a single technology. It is not an operating system :)

For instance, ASP .Net is a fairly cool set of tools we are using in our company to provide our dynamic page content management to our self and some select clients under a variety of fee structures.

So, "legacy" kit isn't going to be supported then huh? :)

Well to be fair, the "legacy" systems need a serious overhaul anyway. I doubt that the older systems are particularly useful for more than surfing the web without a memory upgrade anyway.

That said, XP actually is a better performer for us than Win98 is on similar hardware - the much better memory management gives us much better stability in low memory systems.

Enjoy!