Is payroll fully crippled in later versions?

I'm using payroll in QB 2002 and I am not paying for Intuit's payroll service.  Each week, when I do payroll, I manually fill in the Federal Withholding, Social Security, Medicare and Federal Unemployment.  I get these numbers from tables and a spreadsheet I have setup to calculate them.  It's easy and it works well and it saves me from paying Intuit a ton of money to do a few table lookups.

I consider the 2002 version of QB to be 'partially' crippled for payroll because I can still use it to generate checks and track things if I just manually enter the numbers I described, above.  

I've heard that Intuit has now fully crippled payroll in later versions of QB because they became aware that folks like me were going around their 'partial' crippling.  If this information is correct, then if I upgrade to a later version, I may have to either pay them for their payroll services or be forced to do my payroll in a fully manual manner on the side apart from QB.

My tax folks are telling me that I need to upgrade my QB version to a newer version because it is getting hard for them to support me at tax time because the QB file I'm giving them is from such an old version.

So, to my question (and this has to do with the regular plain vanilla single user version of QB):

Are versions of QB after 2002 fully crippled with respect to payroll?   If so, beginning which year?

Thanks,
Dennis Gallagher
Woods Creek Wholesale Nursery