"We are close, but have not yet signed off on Windows 7," said company spokesman Brandon LeBlanc on the Monday night. "As previously stated, we expect Windows 7 to RTM in the 2nd half of July."

LeBlanc echoed a comment made by Bill Veghte, Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows business, in a presentation at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) earlier today. Although Veghte did not reference that claimed RTM was imminent, he did say that Windows 7 would wrap up in the last two weeks of this month.

LeBlanc cautioned users against downloading in-progress builds that have leaked to file-sharing sites. "There are many bogus copies of Windows 7 floating around the Internet. More often than not, they contain a rather nice malware payload," he said. In May, people who downloaded pirated copies of Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) just hours before Microsoft released the preview reported that the build was .

LeBlanc also provided a few details, albeit at times vague, about when users will get their hands on Windows 7 after Microsoft does declare the code finished.

TechNet and MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) subscribers, who in the past have gotten RTM builds almost immediately, will be able to download Windows 7 from their respective services "a few weeks after we announce RTM," LeBlanc said.