On Monday morning, it looked as if Microsoft had done yet another about-face by extending NT 4.0 support past the rapidly approaching support-cut-off deadlines — despite repeated claims that it had no intentions of doing so.

But by Monday evening, Microsoft was working overtime to correct any misunderstandings caused byits vaguely worded press release about its plans for continuing to offer NT 4.0 fixes beyond the currently stated cut-off period.

Microsoft announced on Monday that it had cemented a deal with the BITS nonprofit banking consortium to continue to "provide financial institutions and other (NT 4.0) customers with security updates for an extended period during which they will migrate their systems to more recent versions of Windows."

But the Redmond software vendor didn't specify how this would affect the support cut-off dates, nor whether the deal covered both NT 4.0 Workstation and Server.

By end of day Monday, the company attempted to clarify its NT 4.0 support plans by adding a statement to its original press release:

The statement reads: "The custom support details referenced in the BITS press release are available to all Microsoft customers and there is no change to what Microsoft has announced previously regarding Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0 support. The end dates for no-charge support remain the same as previously announced."

Company officials elaborated further. "Microsoft worked closely with BITS prior to the enhanced support lifecycle announcement at Tech Ed on May 25th and this release underscores their enthusiasm for the terms and conditions of the enhanced policy," said Peter Houston, senior director of Windows Servicing Strategy ."The custom support details referenced in the BITS press release are available to all Microsoft customers and there is no change to what Microsoft has announced previously regarding Microsoft NT 4 workstation and server support. The end dates for no-charge support remain the same as previously announced."

Microsoft was contemplating issuing a statement on Tuesday to further clarify its NT 4.0 support plans, a spokesman said.

Microsoft is set to phase out support for both NT 4.0 Workstation and Server in the coming months.

While Microsoft announced in May that it had extended support for its business software from seven years to ten. The ten years of support breaks down into five years of "mainstream" support and five years of extended (paid) support. (The old plan was five years of mainstream and two years of extended.) But Microsoft decided against grandfathering NT 4.0 into the new plan, claiming that it could not insure adequately the security of users running versions of Windows older than Windows 2000.

Microsoft already had extended its NT 4.0 support deadlines once – in January 2003. But company officials have reiterated in recent months it has no plans to do so again.

As of June 30, NT 4.0 Workstation users will be on their own, in terms support, as the product will exit completely from the last "extended" phase of Microsoft's product-support lifecycle. This means that users will no longer be able to obtain from Microsoft directly paid-incident support and non-security hot fix support for NT 4.0

On December 31, Microsoft will cut the support cord for NT 4.0 Server. Until then, Redmond is providing paid-incident and security-related hot fixes to NT 4.0 Server customers. Non-security-related hot fixes have been available to NT 4.0 Server customers since December 31, 2003, via custom support contracts with Microsoft, but are also set to end as of December 31, 2004.

BITS is set to provide NT 4.0 Workstation and Server customers with security fixes for an unspecified amount of time, once these cut-off dates are reached. The BITS consortium is comprised of 100 of the largest integrated financial institutions in the United States.

Microsoft officials have denied that the company is using product-support cut-off dates as a tool to force Windows users to upgrade. But quite a number of companies — including quite a few financial institutions — continue to rely on NT 4.0 Workstation and Server as their operating systems of choice.