rlustig: Steve or your rep can best answer your pricing question.

As for your brother in law's machine - that sucks, but he should have locked it down better. My Niveus machine runs Media Center - that's it. The only outbound connections to the Internet it is making is to retrieve Guide data as well as movie cover art, etc. I'm certainly not surfing the Internet with it. When installing an MCE machine is someone's home the best thing to do is hide, or take the keyboard that it comes with.

Also, I never said Life|ware was open - MCE is. How cool is it that even before Vista oficially shipped they introduced a new "Sports" plug in for Media Center that gives the user unprecedented control over what sports they want to watch, record, as well as news, fantasy sports, etc? Great selling tool for the "man of the house". Not to mention all of the other plug ins already available.