Actually, my experience with this has been pretty good. I'm reminded of the classic 'genuine Napoleon's dagger': it's had two new blades and one new handle, but it's still Napoleon's dagger. Had a motherboard go down, replaced it, no request for re-validation. Replaced hard drive, ditto. Added RAM - suddenly a request to validate. One phone call, brief explanation, re-validated. I've only had one M$ license, and right up to my moving to W7 no trouble... maybe the DVD ROM was the same as when I first installed XP.