well after uninstalling vista sp1 beta, which i installed in nov.2007, and installing vista sp1 official release in jun. 2008, all worked fine, no activation warnings or watermark,, this went fine for a month,, then last week i shut down my hp laptop oem vista home premium sp1, and when i opened the notebook up at my destination it asked me to activate vista,, ?? what the !@#!! is going on here,, no matter what i do, reinstall sp1, uninstall sp1, recover from windows image backup,, nothing works, my winver keeps showing its eval copy 6001 with the old sp1 beta date nov.2007,, even with no sp1 i cant activate or validate,, microsoft says its oem, so no support, and hp has no solution that works,,,(when i use rearm it says i have 3 days to activate..lol) i have tried almost everything.. is there any way to remove some registry entries and reinstall sp1 so that it recognizes its the real sp1 and i can use my genuine oem vista key again?? im sick of this now.. and hope that a real person with skills knows how to fix it,, as ms and hp dont really care,,, thanks in advance, mark (pab.tubby) *********************
Backup data & reinstall the OS. Sounds to simple, but time wasted trying to figure all that mess out was time you could have already had it done. I do alot of repairs and any hint of something wrong like nasty spyware, viruses, mucked up Windows by installing beta service packs, etc.. I don't even waste time looking for solutions or scanning for pests, a fresh install and i know its working correctly.
try running ccleaner and winask regestry optimizer see if that helps, could ealsy be that those will remove the bad reg keys, also jv16 regcleaner may be in order, i know it sounds silly but i have recovered many a system using them to remove bad reg keys.