Well, I actually like the subscription model.

Let me explain why:

I download many single tracks from many different albums. If I had to pay for all those cd's, it would be a waste for the 1 or 2 songs I actually want to hear. Also, I don't have to worry about losing them / cd getting scratched. I can re-download my entire collection with one click.

Also, the Zune has some neat features. How about downloading songs over wi-fi hotspots, without being tethered to a computer? Decent games, and prolly more to come. 

I'm not trying to convert anyone into a Zune fan, just saying I like mine and get alot out of the service.

 BTW, all the Zune's are working now. That was just a one day bug (at least till the next leap year)

Umm, how bout a little thang called "DRM"?

 Zune has a subscription option called "Zune pass". Lets you download whatever music Microsoft got a license deal for and listen to it as long as you keep your subscription up to date. In order to make this work, the Zune files are DRM'D so that they "expire" every so often so that you have to hook the zune up to your pc and connect to the mothership for another license. 

 According to this report there is a hot dog "sale" at Wal-Mart where the 2/5.00 deal costs more than purchasing a single pack at $2.44

In digg style (since that's where I saw this) I say "Nothing to see here move along...."     

@Stormyaaron said:

Here is an update for the 4th day of class, ...

 Let me give you some advice:

Never argue with an idiot; they'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Wouldn't it just have been simpler to pick up the phone and call your boss?

Or use correct wording when emailing your boss?

Something along the lines of:

 Me: Boss, I'm almost ready to move the new site. But I need your input on how you want the redirect to work.

 Note that I haven't said anything about moving the database. I am assuming that some time ago it was decided to move the DB and the boss has slept since then. If you haven't already talked about moving the DB, then shame on you for waiting till you're ready to deploy to tell him.

@MasterPlanSoftware said:

Not really, just need to use invoke()... But I guess a few more lines of code would kill your application?

No, I tried using Invoke, but it caused problems with other parts of the code....

Basically the control gets poked and prodded by other parts of the code and creating it on a seperate thread was more trouble than it was worth. 

Well, first off, I'd like to thank everyone for the wonderful amount of input I've recieved so far. This is really what community is all about.

For right now, I'm using custom controls that I add / remove from the program. You do see the controls as they load, but for version 1.0, I can live with that.

Someone made a comment about creating the controls on a seperate thread and then add them in... That would be nice but VS 2008 complains bitterly when you try to mess with the UI on a thread it wasn't created on. I'm sure there are ways to do it, but it got way more complicated. 

As for an MDI form... I haven't used them much, but I remember they were a pain in C++. I'm self taught so maybe I just haven't been exposed to them the right way.  

Also, another reason  I like using the controls approach is that is makes it much easier to re-use the same screens in more than one app. In my situation, I have the normal "Client" software, a special "Debug" version with extra info for me, and a "Verifier" program that's somewhere between the two.

The control's state is reset when it is reloaded, so losing state is not an issue.

 I can't really say what the program is right now, because it's part of a business I am co-founding, but I will say this: I think it's gonna be pretty cool. When we get to a beta stage, I'll post here with some info and screenshots if you guys are interested. 

Lovely....

So could this "instability" in XP indicate a security vulnerability?

I mean cheking if a theme is active shouldn't destabilize the OS.

Besides, if they know there's a problem with this function, why don't they fix it or put a sanity test at the beginning that senses this? 

Umm, becuase there isn't an "offical" way to hide the tabs on the c# tab control. The best you can do is force the region of the panel to cover up the tabs (several google searches turned this up) and that's exactly the kind of hackish code I want to avoid. TRWTF is that you can't say tabcontrol1.tab1.visible = false;

More info:

Yes, I'm using .Net, specifically C# 2.0

 Basically, I'm not that concerned about the navigation control. What I'm trying to get at is what scheme / method do you use to manage shifting many controls onto / off the form?

I don't want to end up doing something like the crazy fox pro wtf that was shown a few years back, where controls were programmatically hidden / shown. I want to do it the "right' way. A tab control is close to what I want because I can drop controls for each section on individual tabs, and just programatically change the active tab. But like I said earlier, I don't really want to go that route because I don't want tabs on the top or side of the screen.

And I have looked at Dxperience and the like. I've actually got the set of free controls that Dxperience puts out there, and I may use a few of them. I like the shinyness of them :)~

 What I'm thinking about doing is making seperate user controls for each screen, and programatically adding / remvoing them from a split container / panel container control. Is this a good way to go about what I'm trying to do?

 Thanks again for the help.