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Why all the issues with Office Advantage and Activation/Re-Activation? RRS feed

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    I have suddenly got this Office Activation issue today despite having a legally licensed full version of Office XP.  I got the error message but my application was already Activated and therefore I could not re-activate and rid myself of the error message.  I read several of the posts and managed to find the answer to my problem which was to delete the data.dat file and then re-activate the application.  All is OK now.
    Well all this is alright for us geeky sorts - but what about all the perfectly legal, law-abiding citizens who are now going to get these scary error messages despite paying for fully licensed applications? Whilst I think that we need to get around the piracy issue, affecting loads of innocent users around the World isn't going to win the argument.  How many calls will us geeky people receive this week from non it-literate friends looking worrying about this and looking for a solution?

    Sunday, September 13, 2009 1:23 PM

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    Hello Sherylp,

    Here in the forums, lately we have seen quite a few posts from customers whose longtime installations of Office 2003 and XP (and especially office XP) suddenly report as nongenuine, and suddenly become brain-dead about whether they are activated or not.

    Although Microsoft Support has to my knowledge not published anything about this, our informal sense of this problem is that it may be due to the use of some over-aggressive "registry cleaner" and "file cleaner" software deleting something that they should not be deleting.
    For great advice on all topics XP, visit http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp
    Monday, September 14, 2009 4:33 AM
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      To my knowledge, we have not yet pinpointed any root cause for this.  However, it could very well be a Registry Cleaner. This has  occured in Vista a short while ago. A "Free" Registry Cleaner was found to be deleting registry keys that told Vista where certain critical files were located, in 64 bit versions of Vista.

      At this point all we can do is gather information until a common trait is found and then track that to it's source.

    Thank you,
    Darin MS 
     
    Monday, September 14, 2009 6:46 PM
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    Thanks for your response however I have not personally used a registry cleaner so I doubt that is the problem with my particular issue which has re-arisen since my post and wasn't resolved.  I was getting the error message still.  I had previously installed Office Live and then unistalled it.  I have now re-installed it but having told the error message to "Remind me Later" I'm not sure how long I shall have to wait for it to re-appear - if it does

    Wednesday, September 16, 2009 8:59 PM