Unusual Windows XP problem

Bard

Hi,

Strange query this... maybe. My first time encountering it:-

When I boot my computer, after typing in my XP password, the system says I
need to activate my copy of windows (today it's telling me I have 6 days left to do it, yesterday it said 7...)

I click "ok" or whatever to accept this and activate it, but then (well after a minute or so) it pops up with a window saying "Your copy of windows is already activated. Please click OK to exit."... which I do, and I get into Windows as normal.

This has only been happening in the past couple of days, and I'm afraid that it'll lock up in 6 days time as it IS counting down, and it still pops up every time I boot.

Anyone any ideas???

Sherifu

If you have this file backed up it's easy. Does this file exist on your system?

Jaoibh

If your copy of windows is legit then its no big deal phone the automated activation system and type in the numbers and it will give you an activation key.
this can be done up to 3 or 4 times. As microsoft seem to no that windows gets corrupt and sometimes needs to be reinstalled.

Bard

It's a legit copy, but I'd "upgraded" with the as-yet unreleased SP3 recently. That may have caused the problem. Also, I somehow seemed to have gotten a pile of viruses from somewhere (I suspect a certain program on a certain USB key) which totally buggered Windows altogether.

Thankfully I run Norton Ghost and store all my data on an external hard drive so I was able to restore from a backup and (apart from losing 2 weeks of emails!) everything is back just the way I like it now.

Sherifu

I tried out a pre-release of vista sp1, it borked my machine. Kept restarting so I had to recover from a disk image. I won't be trying that again.