Quote:
As you may know Microsoft has added a new twist to the product activation scheme in Windows XP. Service Pack 1 will check a machine to see if it was installed using one of the pirated corporate product activation keys found on the net and will block the update. It appears that this has become a problem for some corporate networks as they have found that some of their legally licensed machines were installed using these blacklisted keys. There is also another issue, what about the user who is using an illegal copy and now wants to get legal. Until recently the answer was to re-install, but there is a procedure to prevent having to re-install...
The service pack will look at your product ID. If it is either XXXXX-640-0000356-23XXX or XXXXX-640-2001765-23XXX then the service pack will give you a message indicating that XP was installed with an invalid key and the install will stop. If you want to install the service pack (and probably any future updates) you will have to change the key to a valid one. The way to do this is to reset the machine to an unauthenticated state and then to re-authenticate. LabMice has an article detailing the procedure. This can be a time consuming process if you have a network with several machines that need to be fixed. For this scenario Microsoft has provided knowledge base article Q328874 which has sample scripts on how to do this remotely.