A representative for Microsoft told Betanews Monday evening that a site intended to enable recipients of promotional copies of Windows Vista Ultimate -- folks who are guests at Microsoft-hosted seminars and conferences, for instance -- to register and activate their copies, will be reinstated later this week.

Guests who received copies of Vista can still install them, for the meantime, though without the all-important product keys, they'll time out after 30 days. Promotional copies are sent with special promotional codes inside, which recipients are asked to enter on the company's promotional Web site. But that site was built to go offline on December 31, even though many folks received their copies after that date.

When Betanews reported the story yesterday, some of our readers expressed confusion. Here's the deal: Of course, no one is entitled to Vista. But developers and administrators who attend these MSDN and TechNet conferences, respectively, are given incentive to purchase the company's premium development (Visual Studio) and administrative tools (System Center). The Vista giveaway is one critical step in that incentive, from which Microsoft does earn a little revenue.

In the meantime, some of the recipients are confused; they're thinking they may have only received a promotional edition that was intended to time out after 30 days. And some may end up purchasing their Vista copies anyway -- while others, as we reported yesterday, get busy trying to crack the product key code, which won't please Microsoft in the least. In either event, that's a disincentive for guests to make further purchases, which was the whole idea of the promotion in the first place.

As of Tuesday morning, however, the registration site remains inactive.