Last year, when Microsoft announced a new anti-piracy infrastructure for Windows Vista, I was skeptical. Here's what I wrote at the time:
What's most distressing about the SPP announcement is Microsoft's continued insistence that its anti-piracy tools are nearly perfect and that innocent victims never suffer from errors in their code. … Microsoft insists that "most customers should never be affected by having a non-genuine installation." That reassurance would be a lot more comforting if there wasn't already a solid base of failures in its current WGA program. And now, only weeks after the retail launch of Windows Vista, early Vista adopters are experiencing a wave of validation and activation problems.
I first heard about this a couple weeks ago, in a post that recounted one user's experience with a new game called 9Dragons:
I signup for the game and download the client, install without a hitch. I am playing the game when all of a sudden I get popped out of my game back to desktop with a message that my copy of Vista isn’t Genuine. I tried to revalidate my copy of Vista only to be told that it was still not genuine. When I uninstalled the game and tried guess what it worked. As it turns out, that was just the tip of the iceberg. A quick scan of Microsoft's Windows Vista Validation Issues forum turns up many similar examples, with users who paid for a retail key being told that their copy is "no longer genuine" and that the key is in use.
The underlying issues were quickly identified by Microsoft and publicly disclosed in this post on the Windows Vista Validation Issues forum:There are several threads in this forum that refer to Error 0xc004d401 causing non-genuine status or preventing activation. In those threads, we have discussed 3 applications that have been identified as conflicting with Vista software licensing technology (which causes the issue).
The offenders include PC Tools Spyware Doctor (updating to the most recent version fixes the issue), Trend Micro Internet Security and PC-Cillin Anti-Virus (the issue goes away if you install version 14.56 or later), and nProtect GameGuard.
Full story: ZD Net