Windows Genuine Advantage HEADACHE please help!

A friend of mine brought their computer over recently for me to look at. The pc has been working fine for months. Now he tried to login to it and WGA tells me that:

"This copy of Windows must be activated before you can log in. Do you want to activate now?"

As far as we both know the copy of windows is legit so this was an odd surprise...

I tried to activate it but it gets frozen on the activation screen? It doesn't even load the window so I'm not sure which screen it is!

It also said something about the password being deleted/changed in 2 days.

So, I tried a fix for this that involved deleting "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\WgaLogon"

in regedit and changing/deleting the wgatray.exe and wgalogon.dll files.

After doing so the blue WGA screen in the corner went away but I still cannot log into windows. I researched the possibility of a patch for it but I could not locate the patch myself.

The version of WGA I have is 1.7.0018.1 (KB905474)

I can only log into the computer in Safemode. I tried to do a system restore but it wouldn't load up in safemode?

I'd really like to get this fixed so if you have any knowledge on how to do so please help!

 

Is there a holographic sticker attached with the product key on it ? If so give Microsoft a call - it's a free call to an automated service and takes only a couple of minutes to get you back up and running .

You'll get no help here with bypassing WGA but there are utilities that can identify the product key on your friend's PC in the absence of any sticker . You'll need at least that when making the call .