Patently idiotic? What’s patently idiotic is maintaining a legacy platform that continues to bloat and bloat and then allow in place installs to add to the bloat. MS is dead right on this and the tech community, the ones who are actually knowledgeable, have been saying that they needed to do this for years. Apple did the exact same thing when they went OS X and VM software has been around for a while. Besides I highly doubt by the sound of it that you will be changing your OS anytime soon, probably for a decade if you held on to that pile of steaming filth called Windows ME for that long.
ROFL!
The Knuckledraggers revolt...