In fact, the initiative -- which will include a similar campaign in the near term called Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) to fight piracy of Microsoft's dominant productivity software suite -- is tied in the long term with how Microsoft and other vendors will sell and deliver software.

"It's getting to the point where we're getting 'Advantaged' left and right," said Lauren Weinstein, a Woodland Hills, Calif.-based IT consultant and co-founder of the pro-privacy group People for Internet Responsibility. "The issue is, whose advantage is it?"

In early June, Weinstein publicly revealed via his blog that WGA was sending back data about users' computers every time they rebooted their PCs. That worsened WGA's already bad image: Users complained about WGA's tendency to stealthily install itself on some users' PCs, nag others who refused to install it, and falsely cry wolf with up to a fifth of the legitimately installed copies of Windows it scanned.

"A 20 percent false-positive rate is pretty abysmal," Weinstein said. Most victims have been gamers or PC hobbyists who have upgraded their hardware, which Microsoft has acknowledged can confuse WGA. But some have been businesses like S&S Cycle Inc., a maker of motorcycle racing parts in Viola, Wis.

WGA repeatedly identified S&S's 180 PCs as running pirated copies of Windows, according to network administrator Karen Zander. Worse, it sent that data to Microsoft every morning as employees arrived in the office and turned on their PCs.