TI version 10 Blocked on Windows 7 RTM

After having tested TI 10 (build 4942) thoroughly with both the Beta and RC versions of Windows 7 x64, I was comfortable that the program was performing correctly in Windows 7 despite the official denial of compatibility by Acronis. I did many, many backups and restores successfully as I was beta testing Windows 7 through each of its builds. So imagine my surprise when I installed TI 10 tonight in the final (RTM) version (build 7600) of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and saw the following message when starting TI:



I would really like to understand the technical reasons for black-listing this program and was wondering if Acronis support would be so kind as to list the reasons that TI 10 is supposedly not compatible with Windows 7. If there are good reasons, I would like to understand them since there will probably be a lot of questions on the forum as Windows 7 rolls out. In a spirit of cooperation, I would like to help answer some of the questions that are sure to arise about TI 10 and Windows 7 in the coming weeks and months.

In exchange for all of the free technical support that I have provided in the past or may provide forum users in the future, would Acronis Support in return please help me understand the underlying technical issues that TI 10 causes with Windows 7 ?

 

I wonder if MS are applying stringent executable checking to try and prevent W7 getting a reputation of crashing? To put it another way, if using the MS SDK for a program or specific W7 compilation if a special marker in the executable header is now required. Without it W7 will sulk?

What happens if you try and load it into virtual XP?

As an aside I couldn't get a competitors imaging utility to work properly in the RC version or my file manager (wouldn't interact with Explorer) or Wireshark (just won't run).

 

ATI 13.2010 will be coming out soon and will support W7 -- Now you know you have pay for ATI to officially support W7.

 

I doubt that's the reason because I installed a lot of older software on the RTM version of Windows 7 and the only program that was blocked was TI Home version 10. Disk Director 10, as an example, installed and works fine.

An appropriate question is the following. Who makes the decision to block a particular program; Microsoft or the vendor?

There are well-known methods to get blocked programs to run on Windows 7 that I won't go into here, but suffice it to say that if you unblock TI Home 10 build 4942, the program appears to work just fine on Win 7 RTM, including image mounting. However, I do not want to risk running this way until I can understand the underlying technical reasoning behind blocking the program and then make an informed judgment of whether to use it or not.

It installs and works perfectly in Virtual XP. However, TI will not have access to the physical disk, just the virtual hard disk. Although Virtual XP lets you access Windows partitions on the physical disk through shares, you won't have low-level access to the physical disk itself or to non-Windows partitions on the disk, so backing up or restoring the disk while running TI 10 in Virtual XP won't work. Backing up and restoring Virtual XP's virtual disk, however, works fine.

Oh - one other interesting observation is that image mounting now works with TI 10 build 4942 with the RC release of Virtual XP. It did not work with the Beta or RC versions of Windows 7 and the Beta release of Virtual XP, but I'm not sure if this was due to changes in the RTM version of Windows 7 or to changes in the RC release of Virtual XP. In any event, image mounting now works with TI 10 on Virtual XP on Windows 7 RTM.

 

I wouldn't mind paying them double to not have to use TI Home 2009 or 2010 if I could continue to use TI Home 10. Version 10 is the gold standard; the best release of TI ever.