The microscopic picture of a large class of theories on R ³ xS ¹ has been understood in great details in recent years. In particular softly broken Super Yang-Mills has been observed to have a 2nd (SU(2)) and 1st (SU(N)) phase transition as a function of the size of the compact direction. This transition is believed to be continuously connected to the thermal deconfinement transition in pure YM theory. I will discuss how heavy fundamental multiplets (quarks and squarks) affect this setup for SU(2), leading to center symmetry breaking and, ultimately, to the demise of semiclassical applicability.