I think that you raise an interesting issue--something a step beyond my thoughts above. The question is when is an MS customer justified in breaking the Vista EULA. From the perspective of perfect honesty, which is a desideratum, one would never knowingly break the EULA.
My perhaps imperfect view is that doing so is debatably justified at least if MS (1) does not treat one consistently with legalities, its own EULA, or other customers; (2) does something that is totally FUBAR (e.g., the now remedied case where MS prevented certain older files from being opened after the installaton of SP3 for Office 2003); (3) does not come up with a fix for a Vista issue/problem that reasonably would not be expected to exist on a timely basis; or (4) fouls things up so badly that a genuine Vista installation is judged to be illegitimate. I know that my first attempt at identifying cases where one would be justified in breaking the Vista EULA isn't likely to cover all possibilities.
In this regard, anyone interested, how about giving examples of cases where Vista EULA breaking might be justified, I'll think about them, try to figure out if they fit into my above classes, and revise my classes when it seems desirable. Please understand that one treads a slippery slope when trying to argue that someone did something so "bad" that the other is justified in doing something less "bad." I think that the only cases where this sort of argument might be made even somewhat reasonably is in cases of illegal or unethical behavior by MS. And, unfortunately, whether something is illegal or unethical, often is virtually impossible to determine satisfactorily. But, I say ties go to the customer.
