Microsoft has abandoned a plan to allow users to have free copies of Vista Ultimate if they allowed the company to see how it is used.

Redmond offered the deal last week and it was publicized in a number of technology magazines. Now, Microsoft has withdrawn the offer, apparently because too many people applied.

In actuality, the offer has been available for months, but no one noticed until recently.  It seems that with a tiny bit of publicity, all the software that Microsoft had allocated to the project was taken up in a few minutes.