Francly, i'm getting fed up of this stupid CG world we live in where users have to juggle and zig zag in between the permanent idiotic capitalistic software development battles going on way above our heads for teh sake of profit.
I have a little pipeline of 20 machines, couple of servers, couple of workstations and a bunch of render nodes. 80% which were set up with Vista (Pro Ultimatte and Business) had to be downgraded to XP Pro 64 for compatibity issues with some of the tools i was using, plug ins for 3ds max and AE mostly. believe it or not, downgrading from this piece of crap Vista did cost me money! ...and now that it is all finally running properly... the one tool i use for compositing in my pipeline that is AT LAST (and the last tool of its kind!!!!) 64 bit native.... WILL NOT RUN UNDER XP 64!!!! 
Which means that just because for reasons i absolutely ignore Adobe is forcing me to upgrade all operating systems on my network in order to finally benefit of what AE should have been able to do already for at least over a year! Wow! great marketting plan!
So i'm asking two questions here... and excuse my lack of formality....
1 - ARE YOU FREAKIN KIDDING ME?????!!!!
2 - What are my options if i want to upgrade to AE and Premiere cs5 in order to finally make a full use of those within the 64 bit pipeline (that all my other tools are already set up for ...for years!!!!) without having to spend s#itloads extra in operating systems and other consequent upgrades? Cause as much as i'm willing to go with the flow... i'm just fed up with wasting my money over political decisions ADOBE, AUTODESK, MICROSOFT and more are making just to squeeze a little more each time.
pe@ce,
Adriano Zanetti