I hesitate to even write this, because I really do love VMWare products. We’re currently using ESX 4.0 at work (moving to ESXi 4.1) with vCenter Server managing 3 hosts, and then we have a couple of independent ESXi 4.0 servers running as well. Because we’re getting ready to upgrade the 4.0 servers to ESXi, we wanted to have a support contract in place to make sure we were covered in case something blew up.
Our contract expired back in 2009, and because we hadn’t needed the service contract, we just let it lapse. Unbeknownst to us, when you go to reactivate your license, VMWare makes the effective date of the service contract retroactive to the first day after your contract expired, in our case more than 2 years ago. OK, that would be fine, EXCEPT THAT THEY CHARGE YOU FOR THE WHOLE TIME IT WAS EXPIRED!!! Apparently, VMWare is under the impression that you can travel back in time and take advantage of their support contract in the past or something.
My boss, who is a diehard VMWare fan actually said, “Move everything to Hyper-V. They can stick their license…” (and because I’m clean, and he’s Australian, I’ll not quote the rest of his diatribe. 
) I’m going to see how much it is just to buy NEW licenses, as I have a pretty good feeling it’ll actually be cheaper to go that way, and then we’ll just apply the new license keys to the install.
Anybody else had this problem with VMWare?