Microsoft has this thing Called WGA(Windows Genuine Advantage) that has started flagging installations of Vista, XP, and Office as pirated. While WGA has a certain error rate it’s spiked up to a high level recently. MS has responded by taking their activation servers offline until Tuesday, August 28, 2007. If you have to reload your system or you Microsoft Office programs during this time activation will either fail or the software will be flagged as pirated and shutdown.
Note to ECC Clients:
those of you running Openoffice ARE NOT affected by this issue. Any ECC clients that get notifications from their systems about Microsoft Office and their windows installation being pirated let me know and we’ll call Microsoft and get it resolved.
*UPDATE* According to anandtech.com they have word form MS the issue is now fixed.