Did anybody NOT receive the email?

Affirmative--no email received.  I clicked on the "exclusivity guestimator" once.  Did you know that websites can laugh? 

Microstock>Complaints>Subject>Emotions>Intense>Distaste>Hatred:

Categories! Followed closely by categories. Next is categories. Then a whole bunch of categories. And finally, ending with categories.

Since Categories weren't an option, I selected Uploading, as categories selection is usually around the same time as uploading.  One site in particular makes categories>selection>painful.

Too bad there's not an option for "keyword editing after the photo is accepted."  That's one I would have looked at and seriously considered clicking.

Have you considered a reflector of some kind?  3 Bees are great, but if you put two on your background and one on your subject, you're might have to do something about "the shadow."

Also, those 13' stands, while nice and sturdy, don't let you get the light all that low.  If you're trying to light something that's kind of low (either objects or small children), you'll have an interesting time in getting the light to the proper height.

It would kind of depend on what their intention with the shot is.  If its something that's going to be displayed on a large product run, then you should definitely charge more than for something that's going to wind up as a small graphic on the company's internal intranet.

As for how much, I'm afraid that I won't be of much help, but price it like a commercial shoot--figure in your time for travel, set-up & tear-down, shooting, and editing.  I've made more off of commercial shoots than I have off of stock.

You might want to fire off an email.  I did after quite some time, and was accepted a short time later.  I really shouldn't have had to do that, I wasn't sure if things were still in queue or if something had been overlooked.  They did accept the majority of my admittedly small portfolio, though.

Yep, that's Istock   Many times they need the keywords "disambiguated," probably so they keep their meaning in another language.  I find the DeepMeta program to be a very valuable tool for working with my istock portfolio.  One thing I like about DeepMeta is that you can tinker with keywords and categories on your online photos, especially if you miss something (or think of another relevant keyword).  It also makes uploading very easy, provided that there's room left in your upload limit.

SS  25.91% (74% of previous month)
IS  25.06% (163% of previous month) BME
StockXpert 19.75% (144% of previous month) BME
DT   6.92% (42% of previous month)
FT  13.93% (269% of previous month) BME (had an EL sale--woo hoo!)
123  5.58% (114% of previous month) BME
CS   1.22% (prev month: 0) BME
BigStock  1.62% (prev month: 0) BME

other sites were firmly at 0%: canstock, most, feature, snap, stockriot.
I'm not counting yaymicro because they're not open yet.

Overall, April's the BME.

Maybe he's bitter because he couldn't pass the 7/10 Shutterstock application.

If he were "bitter", he'd be sitting in his office laughing his hind end off at such a thing... *snerk*

Will you recommend to install Vista or XP in a new computer?

How new of a computer?  Did you build it yourself, or is it a pre-assembled one?  Is it a desktop or laptop, and how much memory?

My laptop runs vista (in 32-bit mode)...it drives me up a wall when the hard drive starts running for no reason--even after getting the memory up to 3GB.  My wife runs the 64-bit version of Vista on a machine I built last year--4GB of memory, dedicated hard drives & such.  Vista doesn't bother her at all.  At my day job, the machine I use runs XP.

At some point MS is going to stop supporting XP, and then you'll have to decide on whether to just keep running, or upgrade to whatever the latest version of Windows is.  Or you can avoid a future OS reload (and PS with all your plugins, etc) by going with Vista now.  But it'll drive you bats with how much memory it consumes just to present you with a UI, and by how often the hard drive just mysteriously becomes busy.

At least PS runs fine.   

I uploaded my images too. They have a very friendly/positive/helpful attitude at YAY Micro. They listening very well to the suggestion in the forum. Problems are attacked and resolved limitedly. I can't wait for them to open the doors in June.

Agree completely.  Their upload process is not a painful one.  It will definitely be interesting to see what happens once they do open up.

...whereas my next shot was approved, an isolated apple. 

     Well, maybe more people are buying apples than cotton.  Except for the textile industry.  They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away...

Thanks for posting this!    I'd been digging around looking for this info.