Microsoft Product Activation Can Kiss My Pastey-White Hiney

So last night I was at the office migrating servers between hardware. Nothing really exciting about it. One of the servers I was migrating was an older Citrix Metaframe 1.8 server. That migration was going from basically like-hardware to like-hardware. The only difference between the two machines was the larger RAID array, more RAM, and slightly different processor in the new machine. They were otherwise the same model of server, but I didn't envision major problems, should they arise.

The clone took forwever, but it got done, I booted up the server, made sure the thin terminals could connect fine, and called it a night around 11:00PM last night. This morning at the crack of dawn, got a phone call that nobody could get into Outlook, Word, or any of the other Office XP programs running on the server. The error? Product activation due to significant hardware changes. I thought to myself "OK, easy fix, will just reactivate it." I come to the office, attempted to reactivate on the terminals, and the activation window went away -- never gave me a confirmation that it was activated. When I checked the product activation on the server itself, it told me it was activated, but it was spitting out errors on the client terminals. Tried repairing Office, still gave me fits.

I was spending too much time dealing with this when I had other places to be (as I split my time between a couple offices), so I said "Screw it." A 30 second search found an Office XP activation crack (Anti-MSOPA.exe -- google it) that cracked the mso.dll file, and errors went away. We're a fully legal user of Office XP, have plenty of licenses, but I just didn't want to deal with the activation crap that was causing us wasted time and potentially lost money. It's sad I had to download hacker software to do it. While I still plan on finding out what was wrong, I didn't want to waste company productivity to do it.

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