I saw a really odd one today. A Windows Vista (basic) machine suddenly decided that it had to be reinstalled, for no reason. It just claimed that it had to be activated (which it already was) and the only way to achieve this, according to the error message, was to reinstall the entire operating system – which seemed a little like swatting a fly with a bazooka to me.

The actual error message was “windows must be reinstalled to activate. Please insert the Windows CD or DVD to begin reinstallation”.

I guessed there must be an easier way around this, and eventually I worked this out:
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