"32 bit o/s biz is going to die very hard. XP was quite stable and ran a lot of stuff Vista 64 and Win 64 cannot, and in many cases the software may be orphaned but has a hard core of users. My best friend is a prof and always used WordPerfect. He upgraded to Win7 and it just won't work, always hanging, etc. So guess what, brand new machine now has XP again. "Open Office", well he claims to be an old dog, so no new tricks."
Tell your old dog that open office looks and feels just like MS office, the variations are too small to be a worry to 99.99% of the world, and those it is will be clever enough to adapt straight away. It even runs MS files after all. I tried the Vista thing as was really really happy when the machine went wrong after three days, rushed out and bought three XP laptops. BiaB does everything I need on XP, so downgrading to a later version of Micropoos OS is not going to happen anytime soon. I suspect that at the end of this cycle I will switch to Linux, anyone know of any issues with BiaB and or realband over there?.