Upon further review:
These pages were written back in October 2014. In more recent times, and especially after having used POSReady 2009 on a more regular basis, there are a number of crippling limitations in the form of features that were yanked out. For whatever reason, it also doesn't seem to be possible to set a default browser other than IE. Plus, it's been rumored that the install media was built on one or more infected systems.

All of this serves to turn my originally very glowing review of POSReady 2009 as an alternative to XP into more of an "avoid unless you know what you are getting into" experience. There's nothing wrong with the OS itself, really, but it's not a desktop operating system, and you would be better off by enabling the POSReady updating in XP.