Windows Update causes reactivation?

[Simon]

I had a Windows Update this evening, and when I rebooted my machine as requested, I got a notification along the lines of a license component has been changed, and I am required to reactivate Windows.  WTF!  I rebooted again, and this time got a popup asking for my Windows Product Key.  Luckily I had it to hand, and entered it, so all seems OK now, but has anyone else had this issue?  I can't find anything shouting out on Google, relating to today's update, although there do seem to be a few instances of this happening in the past.

[zappaDPJ]

I've seen it a quite few times on PCs and laptops I've worked on but the cause can be really hard to pin down, especially if it's a one-off event that's been fixed. If it happens again I can tell you what to check but I'd screen shot the message if you can as the exact wording might help diagnose the problem. If I had to take a guess I'd say it was the reboot that triggered the problem rather than the update itself. Why that happened is anybody's guess but I might be inclined to make sure you have a fairly recent backup of the registry just in case.

[Simon]

I'm having trouble believing it was nothing to do with the update, as it was too coincidental.  I've never had that happen before.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention, MS Office also did some sort of odd re-installation thing after the reboot, and I also had to reset my Windows theme, as the desktop background remained black, albeit with the icons present and correct.

[zappaDPJ]

If it had of been an issue with the update it would be all over Google by now unless there was another one issued today that I'm not aware of. That's not to say something didn't go wrong with your particular update though. In fact everything you're describing suggests a registry issue.

[Clive]

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that it's safer to never download Windows Updates.  I know people who do this and have not suffered any harm.  I've twice had computers nuked by installing updates.   

[zappaDPJ]

That's always going to be a risk with any kind of update, I bricked my iPhone last time I got an iOS update. I eventually got it back but it took a while. You would generally struggle to maintain a PC without applying updates so it's a necessary evil and you should be able to recover from a bad update with a system restore

[Glenn]

Looking in the event log may give a few clues.

[Simon]

I don't know if the update was issued today, but it was certainly downloaded and applied today - the second batch this week.

[Simon]

Looking in the event log may give a few clues.

There's nothing glaringly obvious. 

[Simon]

This has happened again, but as far as I know, there have been no Windows Updates.  I got the attached notification as soon as I logged on just now.  I can't find anything current on Google, so it's not as if this is a sudden widespread issue.   

[zappaDPJ]

I still think it's a registry issue but you could try and Google 'Windows 7 An unauthorized change was made to Windows.' along with your Anti-Virus product and see if that flags anything.

[Simon]

I had similar thoughts regarding the anti virus product.  I'm beta testing the new F-Secure at the moment, and this started happening soon after the installation, so have sent the diagnostics file to the beta team for them to look at.  If it was that, though, I would have thought others might have been affected. 

[Steve]

It maybe due to your particular perhaps relatively unique hardware configuration if that makes sense.

[pctech]

Not applying security updates is asking for trouble and can cause issues when installing new software.

Sounds like a glitch with the software protection or Windows activation services.

I've sometimes seen the not genuine warning momentarily when my system is starting up.

[Simon]

Who said anything about not applying security updates?  I always do, and Windows Updates reports as being up to date (ie, no updates available). 

It may be a hardware configuration, but I've not changed any hardware recently, apart from adding a couple of external drives for storage, but that was months ago.

Come to think of it, however, I did have a problem with the powered USB hub a few weeks ago.  It accidentally got disconnected while the PC was running, and subsequently caused the PC to fail to boot.  I can't remember the exact wording now, but it said something about the BIOS Soft Menu having been changed, so I went in a loaded the fail safe values as I didn't know what had changed.  Again, that was several weeks ago, and it's been fine up to now.

I have to admit, the PC is starting to creak a bit, and I've noticed the occasional noise coming from one of the internal hard drives, so maybe it's time I started looking at an upgrade.

[Steve]

I don't know, but is it logical that the BIOS load fail safe values was seen by a Windows revalidation check  as a change in hardware?

[Simon]

Indeed, I would have thought that possible, but the BIOS change was several weeks ago, so if that was the case, I'm surprised the alert didn't appear sooner. 

[pctech]

Was just responding to Clive's earlier comments.

I've updated the BIOS a couple of times on this machine and Windows has never prompted me to reactivate.

[Simon]

It's not happened again yet, but it was a couple of days between the two occurrences before.  One slight worry is that I believe you only get five re-activations, before Windows croaks altogether, and I've already done two.

[Glenn]

Go into Control Panel > System, there it will tell you the activation state.

[Simon]

Okay, I will do when I'm on it later.

[Steve]

I seem to recall activation by phone is not usually too troublesome!

[Simon]

I've heard back from the F-Secure beta team, and helpfully, Microsoft don't give any information as to what actually triggered the reactivation.  They can't see anything obvious, but another user has now posted on the forum with the same thing, so they're looking into it again.  I'm just wondering if it may have changed or removed some system DLLs, or something like that.