that was until I upgraded my hard drive this week. Regardless, I couldn’t really help since I couldn’t reproduce the problem. Really? Maybe he should have read the user’s question more carefully. My favorite answer had to be this one from a Microsoft tech saying “Running a virtual machine counts as running two copies of Windows”. I wasn’t sure what to tell readers and a web search brought up an endless number of forums with the same problem but no answers. I received a lot of complaints from people saying that they were then again asked to reactivate Windows again once they booted back into Windows natively, and then again under VMware and so on every time the OS was booted in a different environment. All this required was to enter the product key, request verification and within a couple seconds everything ran fine. When I first setup my VMware Server to run an existing Windows Install from a physical partition, I was asked to reactivate Windows XP before I could use it as a guest OS. (Time required = 30 minutes) Scroll down to Setting up Automatic Activation to see the process if you are not interested in the background.