Actually, that turned out to be true. But some angel investors are getting into the game again, and a  small number of VCs have even been able to round up dollars for new investments.

Today’s example: Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which has all but completed raising a new fund.

Patricof and his team won’t comment officially about the status of the fund, which follows a $75 million fund he raised four years ago. But he hasn’t been discreet about it, and lots of start-up investors have been chattering about Patricof’s attempt to raise $125 million for new deals.

That’s partly because Patricof is famous in the investment community–his resume goes back to the late 1960s and includes wins in Apple (AAPL) and AOL (AOL), as well as bets on media properties like the Huffington Post and PaidContent’s parent company, ContentNext. And it’s partly because Patricof has, by his own admission, struggled to raise the money over the last year.

Yesterday, for example, Patricof spoke about his fund-raising effort quite candidly at the OnMedia conference. From Mary Kathleen Flynn’s account at The Deal:

“A year ago when we started raising our second fund, which is somewhat bigger, we wanted an institutional base,” Patricof said. “We went out for six months and didn’t get a single response. Then we went back to our original investors, sent out a letter again, and four weeks later we raised a lot of money with just a letter and no phone calls. The individual investor market is a great market.”

Fundraising is “tough” these days, said Patricof. ”But I wouldn’t be smiling as much as I am today if it wasn’t having a positive ending.”

It’s unclear how much Patricof has raised this time. When I talked to him about his progress in mid-November, he told me he thought the fund would be oversubscribed. But sources believe he may also end up breaking the fund into two chunks.

Financial terms, first reported by The Deal, were not disclosed. That said, when rumors of the acquisition began circulating in October, the purchase price was said to be $60 million.

Writing in a company blog post, Microsoft corporate VP Brad Anderson said Opalis is an essential piece of Redmond’s “dynamic data center initiative.”

“This deal brings together the deep datacenter automation expertise of Opalis with the integrated physical and virtualized datacenter management capabilities of Microsoft System Center. I believe Opalis’ software together with the System Center suite will improve the efficiency of IT staff and operations, and customers will gain greater process consistency. Opalis’ software captures the IT processes, in a documented and repeatable way, which can be run over and over again. These capabilities will be added to Microsoft System Center to help customers automate complex IT processes, increase cost savings and shorten timeframes for IT service delivery across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments.”

To date, the company–which makes the leading open-source ad serving software, catering to about 30,000 Web publishers on 100,000 Web sites–has raised $30.8 million. “We raised $15.5 million at the end of 2007 and still had a chunk of that left, so we didn’t have to raise money,” OpenX CEO (and former Yahoo Senior VP) Tim Cadogan told The Deal. “But if it’s generally true that it makes sense to raise money when you don’t need it, in this environment, it is triply true.”

Quadruply true when you’re competing with the likes of Google’s (GOOG) Double Click and Yahoo’s (YHOO) Right Media, which dominate the Internet advertising market in which OpenX plays.

Wrote The Deal’s Cecile Kohrs: “A proposed joint venture between rival Internet companies Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. appears headed for the trash bin, just ahead of an expected U.S. Department of Justice challenge to the agreement, lawyers close to the deal said.”

Well, maybe it will die at some point. But, in the words of Juba in the last line of the greatest movie ever (“Gladiator,” of course!): Not yet.

Said Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich: “We are continuing to have cooperative discussions with the Department of Justice about this arrangement and agreed to a brief delay in implementing the agreement while those discussions continue. We are confident that the arrangement is beneficial to competition, but we are not going to discuss the details of the process.”

It was a sentiment underscored by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was doing an economic summit with Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama today in Florida and told reporters there when asked about the deal: “We agreed to extend our discussions … with the DOJ.”

Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang also said the same during Yahoo’s third-quarter earnings call this afternoon.

In fact, that Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) lawyers, along with the Justice Department, are still talking is the strongest indication that there might be some middle ground to be found in the fight over the future of the search advertising business.

After all, Google is not shy about going to court. Among many others, it took on media giant Viacom over YouTube’s copyright issues with all the relish of a lipstick-wearing pit bull.

In fact, I am convinced that the search giant’s corporate mantra is from Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver”: You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking … you talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here.

And Yahoo? Well, Yahoo can never stop talking, as evidenced recently by its never-ending discussions to merge with the Time Warner (TWX) online unit, AOL.

This is an overall corporate characteristic–Yahoo often has the tone of a 1970s encounter group.

Plus, the deal to put some Google search ads on its site is an important fountain of revenue Yahoo desperately needs. For its part, Google wants the deal, mostly to keep Microsoft (MSFT) at bay.

As for the Justice Department, it has one big problem if it does go hot and files a lawsuit against the Yahoogle twins: A little thing I like to call “proof.”

Now I am no legal eagle, but I am told by experts that it is a little hard to prove damage that has not occurred yet if it is seeking an injunction to stop implementation of the partnership.

It’s like the big question in that dumb but watchable Tom Cruise movie, “Minority Report”: Can you arrest someone for a murder they might commit?

Google, with its dominant market share that grows daily, may very well be the scariest company on the planet.

(I think it might indeed be and have written in opposition many times to this partnership of the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the search space, but who am I to say?)

But making a case that it will turn Yahoo into a satellite, raise ad prices and turn into Godzilla, all before it actually happens, is tough.

More to the point, with all the pressure from public interest groups and advertisers who oppose the deal without some checks and balances, along with Microsoft’s relentless lobbying, some accommodation obviously must be made.

Thus, that is going to take more days of jabbering, probably into next week (although it all does have to be settled before the election, when the regulators pressing the case might be out of a job).

After those blabby avenues are exhausted, of course, we might very well see the digital gladiators go at it. Or abandon the field.

But not yet.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.