Thought I would pass this along for anyone wishing to part with some of their hard earned duckets for some software and expected some type of semblance of support from the company that makes it.  I purchased a product for video editing from Corel called Ulead Video Studio (I guess they bought Ulead like they bought Jasc with Paint Shop Pro).  Now, the product is pretty nice when it works, I say when it works because it’s always been fairly buggy but reliable enough that I didn’t complain.  At the very least it always installed fine when I had to rebuild my machine after Windows decided eating itself was a good idea or something of that nature.  That is until today … when the actual install completes, but it will not accept my product key saying that it is incorrect.  At first I thought it was just one of those situations where I have installed it enough times that I have to have a counter reset somewhere before it will activate again or something like that.  I noticed also though, that no patches would install either, saying that it couldn’t find the product installed on my system anywhere.  That was pretty odd I thought, maybe it’s a Windows 7 thing, who knows.  Either way, even though my product is a couple years old, it wasn’t cheap and we aren’t talking in depth support here (at least on the surface), I just need to activate the thing.  So, I go to Corel’s web site and log in, go to the support section, fill out the long ass form with technical details, hardware specs, screen shots, and lots of other stuff.  It was a pretty involved form, but that’s OK, it will help get the problem resolved right?  Wrong.  I couldn’t even submit the form to get an email to the support staff, I was instead immediately presented with a message that any product that is too old, which they define as more than two versions back, cannot be supported.  That’s it, zip, nada, nil, nothing.  I can’t even ask the damn question.  All I want to do is activate my software that I bought and paid for, and instead I get snubbed and told to go away.  I can tell you one thing for sure, aside from the fact that I will figure this out on my own, and that is I won’t be purchasing any more products that have anything to do with Corel again.  They put out new versions at a frenetic pace, and now I know why.  I had wondered in the past why they released new versions of their software with only seemingly minor changes at the rate of one to three per year.  I think I have my answer you could check here.  That being said, beware you don’t get stuck like I did.