Normally, Kryo addresses these techinical questions, I guess he missed this one.  Anyway, the archiving function in Impulse will save off the selected game installation so the game can be restored if you reload windows or get a new machine.  You can also use the archiving function to take a snapshot of the current installation in case you want to hang on to a copy prior to updating.  However, I don't believe you can restore an archive accross different versions of Windows.  Also, restores don't bypass the need to connect to Stardock for activation.  It's pretty unlikely that Stardock would just drop off the face so I wouldn't be concerned about that myself.