activation wierdness

have a customer that has obviously reinstalled his system 30 days ago since it is telling him he needs to activate bafore he can logon (oem install is pre-activated). If any of you have seen this window, you know it gives you 2 options, yes and no. hit no, it logs you off, hit yes, it is supposed to bring up the activation screen. On his system though, hitting yes brings up his desktop wallpaper, sits there for a while, dosn't bring anything up icons or otherwise, and then logs you off after about 2-5 minutes.
I have run a repair install, same problem, only now it takes about 2-5 seconds to log off once you hit yes to activating windows.

anyone have a clue?

Kinda sounds like a pooched activation crack to me. When i worked at the college i seen something very similar with a pooched activation crack.

don't think its a crack, considering the coa is on the top of the system and the install was done off the recovery cd we provided.

Oh well, I talked to the guy before I left work, he dosn't need any of the data, so monday morning its f-disk and re-install time.

Thats cool, sorry i couldnt be of more help

no problem, thanks for the reply. The thats the first thing I would have thought as well if I didn't see the coa on the case.

I have come across some people that are rabid anti activation, and even though they have a retail/oem genuinely purchased copy, they refuse to activate and use the crack.... why by the frigging software if you don't like the eula????

Quote:

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Originally posted by NooNoo
why by the frigging software if you don't like the eula????[/SIZE]

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I'll tell ya why, because most of the software that we use day to day (office, games etc) run very poorly on lunux. Yeah I know there are substitutes, but most of them fall short of the actual prodct. So until games etc run PERFECT, or at least as perfect as they do on windows, people will continue to hate MS and their ways of doing biz.

I for one hate the ms activation crap, I bought 3, count em 3 licences for XP home and they treat me like some type of criminal every time i have to call them to activate it.

hmmm DA, did you see this?

no I didn't see that one, but it still wouldn't have helped. the system would only tell you that you must activate before you could logon, give you 2 options, yes to activate now or no to not activate. both options would bring you back to the user selection (yes would just take longer).

Cant click on start button if it the system never gets that far.

I did try booting to vga and safe mode with it, but same thing each time.

customer has his system back now (picked it up yesterday) with a f-disk, reinstall, pre-activated.

Oh well.. put that one down to gremlins then