This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can proceed

ptallett — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 19:48:00 GMT

There seems to be a bug in Windows Server 2003 R2 that if you try to repair your system after hardware changes you get the error message "This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can proceed" when you try and login, but when you try and activate, Windows just logs you off.

This seems to be caused by having IE7 installed, if you look in the error log you will see that msoobe.exe has crashed:

Reporting queued error: faulting application msoobe.exe, version 5.2.3790.0, faulting module urlmon.dll, version 6.0.3790.2612, fault address 0x0000618c.

Fault bucket 338988625.

I got around this by repairing with a Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 disk (not R2).

You may be able to get round this by uninstalling IE7.

Cheers,
Paul

Paul Tallett's Web Log : Windows 2003 Server Activation

This copy of Windows must be activated with Microsoft before you can proceed