The pirates that cracked early copies of Vista all sidestepped Microsoft's latest antipiracy technology, the Software Protection Platform. SPP is supposed to shut down any copy of Vista not registered to Microsoft over the Internet with a legitimate, paid-up license key within the first 30 days.

Microsoft has quietly admitted that it has already found three different workarounds to SPP. It says it can defeat one, dubbed the Frankenbuild because of its cobbling together of code from beta and final versions of Vista. It hasn't yet announced success against several other cracks, including one seemingly inspired by Y2k, which allows Vista to run unactivated until the year 2099 rather than for just 30 days.

"Pirates have unlimited time and resources," BayTSP's Ishikawa says. "You can't build an encryption that can't be broken."

Microsoft popular with pirates

According to BayTSP's most recent figures from 2005, six out of the 25 most widely pirated software packages on BitTorrent and eDonkey, another P2P network, originated at Microsoft. Office 2003 was the second most-pirated software behind Adobe Systems Inc.'s Acrobat 7. Other widely pirated Microsoft software includes InfoPath 2003, FrontPage 2003, Visio 2003, Office XP and Windows XP.