I've run into this myself a few times. It would appear your "scrubbed" 
on the drive was not thorough enough and your install was more like a 
repair. Did you delete all partitions on the drive? If not next time 
delete all the partitions, even the system one Compaq/HP uses, create a 
new partition and pick the long format, this should do the trick. I'm 
assuming this is what went on, if you did do all the above then it is 
still a mystery of sorts. The cause is definitely a date stamp of the 
original install somewhere in the system.

HTH,

jose


On 01/25/13 3:01 PM, Russ Cox wrote:
> Not so easy. When I get that message, I have not yet started windows, 
> so there's no way to enter any new license data. I have run into this 
> a couple of time over the years. The only solution I have found is to 
> do a completely new install using a different disk and license. So 
> that's what I did this time too. So the question is academic at this 
> point. I just can't figure out how I am to get around this impasse - 
> can't login till I activate, can't activate till I log in to get to 
> the desktop screen.
> On 1/24/2013 6:48 PM, Don Penlington wrote:
>> Russ writes:
>>
>> How am I supposed to activate Windows before I login>>
>>
>> By phone, presumably.
>>
>> Don Penlington

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