activation issue

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Guest

A customer's xp home machine would not boot to the logon screen (even in safe mode), so after slaving the hard drive on another machine and manually cleaning off the scumware (no viruses found by Norton) I finally got it to boot, but shortly after logging on, got a message claiming that windows needs to be activated, do you want to activate now? When I clicked on yes, it said that there were insufficient resources and kicked back to the logon screen. After using the recovery console procedure in kb306081, I got it to go to the activation screen after logging on, got it activated and all appeared to be well. I disabled one more piece of scumware in msconfig, rebooted, and now it is back in the activation loop again, even after performing the procedure in kb306081 again. The difference is that instead of telling you that it needs to be activated, I just get a blank dialog screen with a red X in it and an ok button. Same thing happens in safe mode

Not knowing what else to try before trying a repair reinstall, I did the kb306081 procedure again, booted in safe mode, logged on the administrator account, and now it acts like it is going to go to the desktop, but then goes back to the logon screen without getting to the desktop

Apart from the question as to why the activation mechanism is so fragile (this is the second machine we've seen doing this in the past month), does anyone know how to resolve this? In the previous case, a full format of the hard drive and reinstall "fixed it" but it would be nice to have another option

Jerry
 
When you have this issue, is it still slaved on the other machine or is it
back on the original machine?
 
We haven't been alerted to anything specific by Microsoft. But, it's
certainly reasonable to make such a check if the system starts acting in the
way you describe. It doesn't surprise me that some users may be having
issues as a result of malware on their system, even problems with
activation. It's certainly something I'll start advising users to check
when I see this issue in the future, if for no other reason than to rule it
out.
 
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