What is it about XP that people just can’t live without

Actually, I will miss the letter 'X' in the name

Antman said:

7x64. I'm a problem solver. It's what I do.

You would get along so well with MathBear in Second Life he's a
math prof at a University in lower N.Y. State LOL

Worked in Private enterprise and Government for many years and the main mantra is "Doing more with less....Tax payers don't want to pay for it and it is working fine". XP works on Dell gx260's or equivalent machines which most government organizations will not replace until they cease to work or will not support a mission critical app. Lately the move has been to Citrix thin client system's which definitely doesn't require the latest and greatest of Microsoft OS's. Quite a few scripting tools require upgrades to run on newer OS's and this also costs money which again doesn't put one additional dollar in anyone's pocket. If this were true then everyone would have a new car and new home every year.

The main answer I get out of business is "It just works" which is all most companies require. All the gui's and bells/whistles in the world will not make a CIO upgrade a single machine until forced by necessity. As for bit-locker, its good for what you get but if your security is subject to audits and penalties then plain bit-locker is not going to make you sleep better at night. While I like both Vista and Win7 I can't see enough reason to spend valuable business capital to upgrade just so I can say I did. By now even the XP boxes have already been encrypted and secured and I don't have to replace machines that are "Just good enough" for XP but not for Vista/7 especially business laptops which lack the graphics to take advantage of the GUI anyway and are far to expensive to replace on a whim. One additional problem I've seen is the lack of technical knowledge rolling out Vista/7 which causes business to hold back even longer.
Once Win7 has been in place a couple of years I believe you will see a move towards Win7 due to the skill sets then available to support large numbers of users. I blame Vista and 3rd party drive vendors for creating the wall that prevented the adoption of Vista that should have occured and the lack of technical expertise going forward due to the non addioption of Vista. The learning curve was steep for a product that people didin't want and now the teachers will have to make the leap from XP to Win7 which will take time and commitment which is usually in short supply.

Just how I see it having come from the IT field.