Hi I am a newbie to your forum, but I do work on these systems forever it seems, I am presently working on a load of Win XP Pro on a new system dressed as follows: Gigabyte GA-965P DQ6 Main Board Intel Core Two Duo E4600 Kingston KVR800D2N5/1G x2 (dual channel) LGE Multi-layer DVD WR Lite Scribe Seagate 3500320AS 500 Gig SATA II x4 in RAID 5 configuration (Intel 32 bit ICH 8R/DO/DH SATA Raid Controller) ATI 2400XT PCI-E VIdeo Display that sums up the important stuff I think Like I say; this is a clean install and everything goes tickity BOOOO, until the tail end of the load when I am promted to log on to the administrator profile and I get the "must be activated" message, no 30 day grace period. Ethernet of course is not loaded in the O/S so I do the telephone activation when on line 3 where you would normally find the installation key, it's blank. I have tried to talk to microsoft and they tell me to reboot it where it should reappear, ( NOT) I was able to log in one time in safe mode under administrator loaded the video driver but wouldn't let me relog back to do anything else. I might have to reload again and see if I can tweak the registry (microsoft forums gives me that direction), but I thought I might try you first. thanks for any and all advice in advance, I appreciate it. le_pinceau