WPA.DBL Problem

[houseisland]

Why would a three-year-old, completely legitimate install of XP Home come up and ask to be reactivated? No hardware changes. Nothing.

I am having difficulty getting straight answers out of the user. But it seems that there was a loss of Internet connectivity but LAN access was OK. Then on reboot..... Please activate Windows. But activation won't work because there is no Internet access.

The WPA.DBL file exists but its size is way too small and the time and date stamp on it are too new.

I have checked the drive for viral/trojan infections. It is clean. There was some relatively innocuous spyware. The Hosts file is OK. Nothing obiviously wrong.

System Restore is not working.

The obvious choice here is to do data recovery, followed by a clean re-install.

But I am curious. I have not encountered anything exactly like this before.

An opportunity to learn.....

Any ideas.

[futuretech]

I have had that happen to me and in my case my onboard NIC went.
I just said to heck with it and did a fresh install and found at that point that it would not install the onboard gigabyte nic.

[houseisland]

Hi,

In this case, the onboard NIC is just fine.

I have already reinstalled on another drive and everything is working fine.

I am still curious about the problem though.

[houseisland]

The only rational explanation that I can come up with for this problem is that the user did a system restore to a state before activation.

Edit: Forgot to add this link: http://netsecurity.about.com/od/windowsxp/qt/aaqtwinxp0829.htm

It explains how to transfer Windows activation information when resetting up the same system. This information would have been most useful to me when I worked repairing navigation systems on boats.

[futuretech]

We put togeather a brand new pc today installed xphome activated it during setup after first startup looked at device manager updated some drivers that were not found restarted and had to activate again. Long call to Microsoft to get it activated again.
So I guess installing or updating a driver can cause a glitch like that.

[geoscomp]

Well, if the NIC had some problem that caused it to appear to have a different MAC address for example, or to not be installed on boot up, that loses you three out of ten yes votes on hardware poll, and you need 7 out of ten yes votes to not have to reactivate..the NIC for some reason counts for three votes on the hardware poll, so that is the most likely suspect.