Yeah, agreed.

For what it's worth, even before XP and its copy protection came around, I've never depended upon the concept of backing up the OS. I've always assumed, in the event of a hardware failure, that I'd have to reinstall the OS/apps/patches from scratch and just restore data/work files.

But yeah, this guy's situation sucks and I think it's terrible that Microsoft's own copy protection is what's preventing him from doing proper disaster recovery.

I hate XP.