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AND NOW, SOME COMMENTARY... JUST BECAUSE I CAN
What's really sick is that we had this technology back in 1989.  It was called Visual Test which was basically a companion product to Visual Basic and the other Visual development tools we had. 

We sold it off a development tools firm later on, probably because it was a bit ragged at the edged and originally created to just be a regression testing tool we built internally and just designed to package up and monetize.  I should know:  I bought the thing while I worked for Hewlett Packard back in the days when it was all about Windows 2.0 & Windows 386.

But it worked.  You could create and record your own "script" simply by moving your mouse around, typing on the keyboard, and having Visual Test record and macro-ize everything you were doing, so that you could edit the script then play it all back.  It was pretty impressive actually:  You could record scripts on the basis of windows/object names (so that the windows didn't have to be exactly in the same spot over and over again) or you could record them on the basis of absolute location on the display, meaning everything had to be in exactly the right location.And you could compile the script into an .EXE so that it could be distributed and used against any test system.

And here we are, in 2007, slapping the name "Active Content Wizard" or something like that, and putting the damned automation engine into Windows.  WELL IT'S ABOUT TIME.

What's old is new?  Could we have been using Guided Help in 1989?  Really, it depends on how you think of Guided Help - which parts of it you consider important.

Some of the concepts in Guided Help (e.g. ui automation) are old.  They've been available as an accessibility feature for a long time.  They're used extensively for automating testing here at Microsoft.  And I've been a fan various implementations of ui automation for a long time for automating various tasks so that my computer could work on one thing while I worked on another.  I think I used to use Macro Magic? back when I worked at a testing company (GRE on computer, etc).  Before that, I think there was a macro recorder application that shipped with an early version of windows.  Although, since becoming a programmer my tasks aren't really amenable to this kind of automation.  Guided Help isn't made for those purposes and would need work before that was really ideal, although I suppose it could probably be used for them in some cases.

But some other other concepts in Guided Help weren't around - the interaction model being the big one.  We also do a number of really interesting things in our automation of the UI that improve robustness and allow the user to mess up and still be able to continue on.  But it's hard to make something that you want the user to read, while looking at something else over a different app, and not get horribly confused (until we got that just right, the usability tests were gruesome).

Would it be fair to say that Guided Help is a mash-up of some existing technologies, plus some new goodness?  Absolutely, it's a fair statement.  I just hope it serves our customers well.  But I can say that Guided Help is very new code - it was written by just a few developers on my old team.  We shared some code and techniques for automation with the Vista Speech Recognition folks, and with some of the test automation frameworks in use at Microsoft, but the vast majority of the codebase is brand-new (get it while it's hot :).  And I agree - it's about time!