That's a "near-impossible" requirement, says Braunstein. "You're probably lucky if half of the PCs [at a large company] still have the COA after three years," he said. As for the installation CD, "one of the first things a company does when they get a new PC is throw away the installation disc."

Confirmed Jake Player, CEO of TurnTech: "The majority of machines we get don't come with the original Windows CD."

A mixed message

Moreover, refurbishers struggle with even lower margins then conventional PC makers. At TurnTech's site, many several-year-old Pentium 4 desktops with Windows XP Professional command less than $200.

"It's very difficult to make any money in this market," Braunstein said. "Microsoft has only been standing in the way of folks."

Unofficially, Microsoft has not strictly enforced its EULA with smaller refurbishers, choosing to tolerate this de facto piracy because the alternative -- refurbishers installing Linux instead -- is far worse in Redmond's eyes.

Microsoft's attitude "is 'Please don't pirate software. But if you do it, make it's ours,'" Braunstein said.

But large refurbishers such as TurnTech, which expects to sell 800,000 refurbished PCs this year, have been forced to comply with Microsoft's rules and ship out most of its PCs without any OS on them, says CEO Jake Player, which is why he has been "begging" Microsoft for relief.

Besides giving TurnTech an undisclosed discount on certified copies of Windows XP, Microsoft will supply the company with deployment software that will help detect and load needed drivers onto a large number of PCs in a matter of minutes.

"It helps customers know what they are buying," he said. "We are anticipating a sales uptick of 20 percent."

Relief and respite on the way

MAR comes just in time, too, from Player's point-of-view. He predicts a huge wave of older PCs will start hitting the market within a year or two, as companies upgrade to Vista and dump their existing, underpowered PCs.

Braunstein applauds MAR: "Microsoft is getting a little smarter," he said. But he thinks that until Microsoft expands the program, especially with smaller refurbishers, the company's likely to "continue to do things as is."

Shakeel said MAR will be "expanded as quickly as we can," first to North American refurbishers selling more than 5,000 systems a year, and then to other parts of the world.

A different program is in the works to encourage smaller refurbishers to get legal, he said. In the meantime, Shakeel confirmed that those firms won't have to worry about sudden anti-piracy enforcement coming from Redmond.

"There's nothing in the immediate horizon that should be a worry to the market," he said.