I used a Seagate free tool called Seagate DiscWizard (based on Acronis TrueImage) to image my old Seagate drive over to a new Intel X25-M SSD 80GB drive. This is my workstation and not a gaming station so even with XP, Solidworks, Adobe Creative Suite, Quickbooks Enterprise, etc. the installation was only about 25GB (counting the swap file!). This worked well but I got an activation warning. I don’t remember the syntax but basically the oobe service failed whenever I tried to activate. Ok, great. So I do some work not really worrying about this ( I looked into it and tried some solutions but nothing was effective to this point) and reboot my computer about a week later. Here is where the genius comes into play.

When I reboot into windows and click on my profile to login, I get a warning saying:
A problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license for this computer. Eror Code: 0x80004005

After this error message, I am logged off automatically. Ok, so this is a catch-22, a loop I can’t get out of because I can’t get into windows but I also can’t activate my product. So I look around the internet a bit and find LOTS of people doing recoveries or plainly performing complete re-installs. Now, this being a business computer, I have WAAY too much time in customizing what I want and even my last image has a lot of changes that I would not like to go through again (image from just 1 week ago). The just reinstall it method is a HUGE waste of my time.

So I do the following based on a few posts like this:
http://www.anetforums.com/posts.aspx?ThreadIndex=27591

Open your computer in safe mode, open a command promt

Register the following DLL s
it should be in the %system root% system32 folder

just type the following statements one by one and see you got success information popup

regsvr32 licwmi.dll
regsvr32 regwizc.dll
regsvr32 licdll.dll
regsvr32 jscript.dll
regsvr32 vbscript.dll
regsvr32 msxml.dll
regsvr32 shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 softpub.dll
regsvr32 wintrust.dll
regsvr32 initpki.dll
regsvr32 dssenh.dll
regsvr32 rsaenh.dll
regsvr32 gpkcsp.dll
regsvr32 sccbase.dll
regsvr32 slbcsp.dll
regsvr32 cryptdlg.dll

Be sure to use Safe mode without networking because the networking will require the same activation! This didn’t solve my problem so I did this:

I have verified these files:

WindowsSystem32secupd.dat
WindowsSystem32oembios.dat
WindowsSystem32oembios.bin

Problem still not solved, next step (Method 2 as listed in this link):
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306081

Now this did in fact work! My computer was up for one day and mentioned nothing about licensing. On my next reboot (after Adobe updates and working on enabling AHCI mode for this new SSD drive), I was again stuck in a loop of MS stupidity.

In the end, I had to get a hacking tool which disables the winlogon.exe check title ” Windows 2003 & XP & LH Anti Product Activation Crack 2.0.1″. Normally I do not advocate cracking software but this is a legal copy, all my software is legitimate and there was not “legal” way to fix this waste of my time. Adobe also has some terrible licensing requirements and despite purchasing their software, I have had to crack their software in the past to get my LEGAL copy to work. Apparently we are reaching the point where the hacking solution is faster, more effective and smarter than spending hours looking for the right way to do things. If I had used this XP crack to begin with, I would have saved myself hours of wasted time. Thanks Microsoft!