I think thats becos most downloadable ISO's of office xp are cracked already maybe it was something you had to do on the old beta's of office xp i dont know but i've had 3 different office XP's installed and all of them said it was already activated when i clicked on the "Activate" link in the startmenu. Hopefully this will happen with the RTM and final version of windows XP as well after a while.