I'm giving up at home.

This is the final straw. I've used and actually liked MS products - particularly NT4 and 2000, with XP grudgingly used as my main home OS - but the patching is beyond a joke. The big draw for me was Visual Studio, which I think is pretty damn good, but it isn't good enough to put up with this.

I've recently bought a second hand ibook G4, and consequently my primary XP desktop hasn't been turned on in weeks. And of course, when XP does get booted, it'll be bleating about updates required...

So that machine is getting Ubuntu on it. The server (2000 based) is getting wiped and having Ubuntu on it. The mail server is already running OpenBSD.

Where do I take my licenses for a refund? I never knowingly agreed to being treated like an idiot by Microsoft!