As someone who was NTSE certified in the late '90s, you are absolutely correct.

I stopped supporting the platform when they:

- Mandated WGA even for licensed partners that got "Teh Crate" of every release every month which mandated multiple hosts for every version in lieu of simple multi-boot

- Allowed arbitrary code in the Registry

- Embedded IE making multi-browser testing a nightmare

- Developer API support went from detailed direct emails and MSDN articles from actual people to "search MSN on Google".

Just let Windows "die on the vine". There's zero point to continue propping up this dead platform outside of...edge ;) cases for industrial, embedded, military, and govt., use that are (mostly) already effectively version-locked anyways.