About a month ago I received my computer from the computer shop but because they refused to give me the drives I wanted I had to send the unit back to the shop again to get a floppy disc drive and dvd-rom drive installed. As soon as I got the computer back for the second time I switched it on. Everything was going fine until I got this message that said "25 (or whatever) days left to activate windows". I thought "OK... I'll activate it now" only for the message "You have already activated windows" to come up. Therefore I brushed it off and thought it was just a bug in the program, but the message kept on coming up for the next 25 days that I had a certain amount of time left to activate windows. Now I'm at the end of this 25 days and the computer has locked me out of windows because I "have to activate windows". But the damned thing keeps on saying that I've "already activated windows"... so what do I do? Its stuck in a never ending cycle that goes like this...

1) The computer automatically logs me in only for the error message "You must first activate windows before you can log on. Would you like to activate windows now?"

2) I press "OK" only for the message "You have already activated windows" to emerge. I have no option than to press "OK"

3) It brings me back to the log on screen. When I try to log on again it goes back to 1) continuing a viscious circle.

This is very annoying. I have 100 gig of very important data on this computer that can't be lost so reinstalling windows is not an option really. I can go into safe mode but that's about it. Please help!

It sounds like Windows is confused and it might require someone at Microsoft to force the activation through. Check out the following articles from Microsoft as they may help resolve this for you:

[url]http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307890&sd=techh[/url]
[url]http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/evaluation/features/activation.mspx[/url]

Also, note the following quote from the bottom of the second link provided above. Are you given an option to use telephone activation? If not, disconnect from any network connections you have and then choose to activate again. See if it gives you that option. From there you'll get a phone number where you can call Microsoft, which I believe is necessary at this point. Good luck!