I decided to upgrade my work PC to Windows 7 Enterprise, 64 bit with Service Pack 1 integrated. I sure am special, aren’t I? (Don’t answer that question Smile). Anywhoo, a problem came up after I manually installed Office Professional Plus 2010. After a few days, pop-ups started appearing warning me to activate Office 2010 soon. This is something that I shouldn’t have to do because we have a Key Management Host server (a.k.a KMS) to handle automatic activations on our network. For some reason my computer refused to ‘talk’ to the KMS server which, in effect, caused my installation of Office 2010 to not activate. After some help from our incredibly smart System Administrators, we fixed the problem. In a nutshell, we manually cleared out the KMS activation info from my computer, added the correct information, then forced the Office activation. Lo and behold, these steps solved the problem! Here are the detailed steps we took to resolve the issue:

*** Execute all commands from the Windows command line:

  1. Remove the current KMS Host info from the Windows Registry:
    Cscript “c:\Program Files (x86)\microsoft office\office14\OSPP.VBS” /remhst

  2. Restart the Office activation service on the local machine:
    Cscript “c:\Program Files (x86)\microsoft office\office14\OSPP.VBS” /osppsvcrestart

  3. Permit administrator-priviledged license operations including internet\telephone activation by standard users (I probably didn’t need to do this, but I did it on my own computer anyways):
    Cscript “c:\Program Files (x86)\microsoft office\office14\OSPP.VBS” /puserops

  4. Manually set the KMS Host to activate against:
    Cscript “c:\Program Files (x86)\microsoft office\office14\OSPP.VBS” /sethst:[FQDN OF KMS HOST]
    Example: Cscript “c:\Program Files (x86)\microsoft office\office14\OSPP.VBS” /sethst:server1.contoso.local  <— No spaces after the colon.

  5. Force Office activation:
    Cscript “c:\Program Files (x86)\microsoft office\office14\OSPP.VBS” /act

These commands can be entered into a batch file for easy fixin’.
**To use these commands on a 32 bit machine, just remove the (X86) text from each line.

  • Joe