One of my client still doing her accounting work @ 3 locations, running Windows ME as standalone with networked printers (long story ...) on antique Dell GX 260's and 270's - every so often, run my Linux on the Dell by dual-booting into ME when a get the SOS calls. Thankfully, these aren't their workhorses or else and convinced her to give up on those 3.5" floppies years ago in doing backup.

See that is just nonsensical to me. I mean I sorta get XP's long, long life; it was a very good, solid OS (I moved to Win7 a long time ago, but XP was solid)

However, Windows ME? Uh, that was not exactly Microsoft's shining moment...

Regards

Those don't really sound like they're XP updates. The issue isn't really that XP will stop checking for updated, but that updates will no longer be issued. So it's not surprising that you'd get the office updates.

However, there's also a remotely exploitable vulnerability that MS advised on recently. While they no longer report on whether XP would be vulnerable on advisories, my guess is that it's likely given the nature of things (that said, it does appear to be something that only affects machines that are on domains, so not likely an issue for people using it at home). What's interesting on this latest issue is that MS isn't releasing a fix for Windows 2003 either, even though the EOL for that isn't until this July. (Hmm, further reading and they actually include XP in the section on why they say they're not releasing a fix XP, 2003 or 2000.)

Updates for XP will continue until 2019 per an agreement with Microsoft and the banking and other point of sale industries. A simple registry change will cause Windows Update to view XP as a POS version. Updates will then work as always. In the past year there have been numerous updates to XP.

The author posted a follow-up article to that:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/hacked-...ll-a-bad-idea/

It's kind of a bad idea because everybody else is dropping support for it. So if you have line of business applications that run on it and rarely change, probably not a big deal. If you expect the ecosystem to still work, you're likely in for a bad time.