Remember the legal ruling from the EU that forced MS to sell/ship a version of Windows XP without media player in Europe? Well, they have that version out there now, but it seems that the regulators are the only ones who want it:

Retailers in Europe report that there's no interest in the XP N versions. The problems are price and perception. Despite lacking a key feature of the mainstream XP versions, the XP N editions are priced identically to their non-N counterparts. Too, the lack of a media player means that XP N buyers need to manually download a media player, which, believe it or not, is still a daunting process for many people.

Some PC makers--notably Dell and Sony--have simply refused to ship the XP N editions. "From our experience, customers purchasing computers expect them to come equipped with the capability of playing back digital media files," a Dell spokesperson said.

Having fixed up more than one Windows installation in my time, I can verify that - I still recall my neighbors, who are not dumb by any means - but they couldn't get their printer installed, and it "only" required a download of the appropriate driver.