Once again, for the 2nd time, Vista deactivated itself for some undefined reason (no hardware changes). After a reboot, I got the message "Your activation period has expired" ... The online (re)activation process worked at that point! I loggued in and thought it was ok (after all, that was my 3rd activation of the same Vista install on the same laptop). Today (one week later), in order to update an old Windows 2000 machine, I needed some patches from Microsoft (Genuine check required) and realized that Vista was activated (or at least saying so) but not recognized as such on the Microsoft website. The Genuine check error message is : "Windows must be activated before validation can determine if this copy of Windows is genuine." The solution to this problem seems to be the phone activation, but since I was already forced to call MS for re-activation 2 months ago, I feel more like switching to OSX right now ... Oh, and since Vista is not seen as activated/genuine on MS website, I cannot download the previously mentioned patch that should be installed before phone re-activation (vista re-activation patch) Vista is genuine, not genuine or both : Thanks Vista