MS may have used a pirated software in XP

Apparently a pirated version of the professional audio editing software called Soundforge (formerly published by Sonic Foundry, now owned by Sony), as used in the making of of the Windows XP help files. The signature of a hacker known as Deepz0ne, who was a member of the cracking group Radium, can be found in the XP help files if they are opened with Notepad instead of an audio player. According to the quoted article, this is the case with all copies of XP. We'll keep you up to date on any possible copyright suits that emerge from this.

Members of a former software cracking group have discovered that audio files created with one of its cracked programs are distributed with each copy of the Windows XP operating system, possibly exposing Microsoft to a large-scale copyright infringement lawsuit.

Tom's Hardware article: Pirated software used to create help content in Microsoft's Windows XP