The benefit to the VPC images is that they can be converted to something VirtualBox understands, and used under OSX and Linux, as well. Still a PITA to have to do that every 6 months, though.
Four months now, and Microsoft recently made changes to the activation code such that if it can detect you're not running in VirtualPC (on Windows, natch), then it disables itself. I've tried multiple avenues of converting the latest timebomb (came out a couple of weeks ago) to both VirtualBox and VMware and have been completely unsuccessful.
The only time I've ever tried to convert one of the VPC images, the guest OS decided that my hardware had changed too much and demanded that I reactivate it. Unfortunately, activation isn't available for these images, and the image became unusable. What's your trick?
I've found that signing up for a Microsoft tech net subscription is a decent way to get access to various os/browsers without having to deal with any timed expirations. You can download any of the currently supported Microsoft OSs and setup a bunch of virtual Machines. Plus, office and other application software is available as well.
I'm certainly not thrilled with this setup as I wish Microsoft could just allow different IE versions to be installed side by side. But the subscription cost is $200 in the US, so basically if you were planning to by a license to any piece of Microsoft software you might as well get this instead.
