Activate Windows when remote connect

[JJM0926]

Hope someone could help shed some light.

When I try to remote desktop connect to our Windows 2003 server I get
an activate windows message. I can log in to the server as
Administrator, but can't get any further. It prompts for activation.
It is already activated and we've had this server for years. What's
really odd is I can go on the server itself and on the console and I
don't get any activation message. We haven't done any upgrades or any
recent updates. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Greg O]

On Jul 19, 8:19 am, JJM0926 <jjm0...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hope someone could help shed some light.
>
> When I try to remote desktop connect to our Windows 2003 server I get
> an activate windows message. I can log in to the server as
> Administrator, but can't get any further. It prompts for activation.
> It is already activated and we've had this server for years. What's
> really odd is I can go on the server itself and on the console and I
> don't get any activation message. We haven't done any upgrades or any
> recent updates. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Perhaps if you phone Microsoft activation and get an unlock code it
will be fixed. You say you didn't change any hardware?

 

[JJM0926]

On Jul 20, 9:00 am, Greg O <grego...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 19, 8:19 am, JJM0926 <jjm0...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hope someone could help shed some light.
>
> > When I try to remote desktop connect to our Windows 2003 server I get
> > an activate windows message. I can log in to the server as
> > Administrator, but can't get any further. It prompts for activation.
> > It is already activated and we've had this server for years. What's
> > really odd is I can go on the server itself and on the console and I
> > don't get any activation message. We haven't done any upgrades or any
> > recent updates. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Perhaps if you phone Microsoft activation and get an unlock code it
> will be fixed. You say you didn't change any hardware?

Didn't change any hardware. I rebooted and ran an update on it from
the console. Once updates were finished, everything was back to
normal. I can remote connect in from a workstation and I no longer
get the activate windows message anymore. Not sure what happened. As
I mentioned, there hasn't been any recent updates ran on the server,
no change in hardware or anything....Oh well...That's Microsoft for
you sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't...

 

[Brian Spolarich]

"JJM0926" <jjm0926@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1184949059.435929.168410@d55g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> Didn't change any hardware. I rebooted and ran an update on it from
> the console. Once updates were finished, everything was back to
> normal. I can remote connect in from a workstation and I no longer
> get the activate windows message anymore. Not sure what happened. As
> I mentioned, there hasn't been any recent updates ran on the server,
> no change in hardware or anything....Oh well...That's Microsoft for
> you sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't...

You may be experiencing this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312362

See my thread "Console Logon Issues with WSS 2003 R2".

Basically memory management problems cause DLL calls to fail. On my
system this eventually caused WPA calls to fail, making Windows think it
wasn't activated. A reboot would fix the problem, until the memory issues
got to the point where they started impacting running processes, and the
cycle would repeat.

I don't know yet if the registry changes suggested in the KB article
worked yet (its only been a few days since I made the changes), but we'll
see. If you're seeing the 2020 errors from SRV then this is the likely
culprit.

-bws