I seriously doubt that a measly 64 Meg of RAM is keeping anyone from "upgrading" to XP. More likely is the wish to avoid asinine licensing terms and product activation crap that come with XP and its generation of applications.

After all, if you're happy where you are, and the road ahead shows nothing but misery, why go that direction? If what you have serves your needs and continues to run without constant reactivation or forced upgrades, there's no point in making the so-called "upgrade". That's why there are so many Win98SE boxes out there still. And that's why M$ won't fix IE for those older versions, so people are forced to upgrade or risk losing their data, financial, and/or identity info.

As for making it compatible with current hardware, let alone older hardware, that's just not the Wintel way. Intel has to bring out spiffy new features that can only be used by new versions of Windoze, and M$ ensures that the new versions of Windoze will only run poorly on anything but the very latest hardware. They've been running us around that vicious circle for decades; you didn't really expect them to change the recipe for their success merely for the consumer's benefit, did you?

Don't forget, M$ is getting into embedded systems, too. Soon you'll be hearing your multimedia refrigerator announcing, "You appear to have installed a new bottle of milk in your refrigerator. Please insert your credit card in the slot provided on the front of your M$ WinFridge to upgrade your license to a multi-bottle version." I can hardly wait...