Although Microsoft has officially stopped providing free security patches for Windows XP, millions of people haven’t got the message and are still running the ancient operating system. As a result of this, there’s widespread interest in figuring out ways to get patches, and last week, a registry change started circulating that appeared to reinstate Windows XP’s security updates.

In spite of the end of public support, Microsoft is still developing security updates for Windows XP. There are two main demographics that benefit from these fixes. The first are the governments and large corporations that are paying Microsoft large sums of money to gain continued access to hotfixes.

The second are users of Microsoft’s various embedded versions of Windows XP. These versions of the operating system are designed for things like ATMs and industrial machinery. The core parts of these operating systems are identical to those from regular, non-embedded Windows XP, and as such, patches that apply to these operating systems will tend to also work on regular Windows.