D
Dave Dewire
I now there is a forum for Genunuine Advantage but I posted there and they
suggested I post my issue here.
Im seeing a problem with Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications that I just
cant explain.
Bascially for the last two months my orgnaization has been seeing hundreds
(atleast 300 that I know of, problem many more) of WXP PCs coming up with
non-genuine messages.
To be clear, I am 100% certain our VLK is still valid. Running Genuine
Advantage diagnostics passes every test and going out to the Genuine
Advantage validation site tells me I am valid which begs the question on why
this happened to begin with. As of yesterday it was still happening on PCs
that were not doing it a few days ago. We do have PC with this same VLK that
have not (yet) had this problem. We did not have this problem prior to mid
December 2007.
My best guess at this point is that Im not having a Validation problem, Im
having a Notification problem.
I did open an incedent with Microsoft Support but they want me in front of a
bad machine to troubleshoot and therein lies the problem. In ever single
case if I logon on the PC 3 times the problem goes away which means by the
time I hear that its happening, they have already logged into it atleast once
and something has already changed. To make it even more confusing, half the
PCs have Deepfreeze installed on them so all changes are undone every reboot
yet 3 logons fixes those as well. To be clear, 3 reboots does not fix them,
they must be logged in 3 times. I will also note that even running the WGA
diagnostics seems to fix the problem with just 1 logon, I suspect the
diagnostics alone are updating WGA to the most current version before they
run and that fixes the problem as well.
Based on what Ive read on this forum, WGA is not required nor recomended for
enterprise computers and the solution is to not install WGA on enterprise
PCs. Unfortunately the horses are already out of the barn, we do use WSUS
but WGA isnt updated via WSUS and based on some logging Ive done, I see
atleast 20 different versions of WGA installed (as far back as 1.3.0254.0) on
various PCs from when their last manual windows update was ran. At this
point it isnt clear if its a particular version causing the problem or
perhaps it only happens when windows decides it wants to revalidate and has
an old version. That wouldnt explain why PCs with deepfreeze that havent
changed in any way for alteast several months would want to revalidate but
thats a different issue.
The only solutions I can come up with are to either rip out WGA, which
someone could accidently put back or intentially put back if they needed to
download something manually from Microsoft. The other option would be to
always push out the the latest WGA update via a different process. This
would by no means be easy because half the machine have deepfreeze on them
and it doesnt guarentee it would fix the problem. The other problem with
this is that the most current version of the WGA update KB905474 v1.7.18.1
released 12/14/2007 does not have the most current version of files for WGA.
I already have PCs with 1.7.59.1 on them which begs the question of how I
automate the install of the latest version when there is no install for it.
I dont expect to ever figure out what caused it but Im at a loss as to how
to prevent it in the future and I cant have this continue to happen on a
large scale.
Id be happy to reopen the incident but since I cant recreate the problem, I
cant really tell what is happening. Based on what Im seeing, I dont believe
changing to a different VLK would have prevented this problem.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to troubleshoot this further or what to do
about it?
Thanks,
Dave
suggested I post my issue here.
Im seeing a problem with Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications that I just
cant explain.
Bascially for the last two months my orgnaization has been seeing hundreds
(atleast 300 that I know of, problem many more) of WXP PCs coming up with
non-genuine messages.
To be clear, I am 100% certain our VLK is still valid. Running Genuine
Advantage diagnostics passes every test and going out to the Genuine
Advantage validation site tells me I am valid which begs the question on why
this happened to begin with. As of yesterday it was still happening on PCs
that were not doing it a few days ago. We do have PC with this same VLK that
have not (yet) had this problem. We did not have this problem prior to mid
December 2007.
My best guess at this point is that Im not having a Validation problem, Im
having a Notification problem.
I did open an incedent with Microsoft Support but they want me in front of a
bad machine to troubleshoot and therein lies the problem. In ever single
case if I logon on the PC 3 times the problem goes away which means by the
time I hear that its happening, they have already logged into it atleast once
and something has already changed. To make it even more confusing, half the
PCs have Deepfreeze installed on them so all changes are undone every reboot
yet 3 logons fixes those as well. To be clear, 3 reboots does not fix them,
they must be logged in 3 times. I will also note that even running the WGA
diagnostics seems to fix the problem with just 1 logon, I suspect the
diagnostics alone are updating WGA to the most current version before they
run and that fixes the problem as well.
Based on what Ive read on this forum, WGA is not required nor recomended for
enterprise computers and the solution is to not install WGA on enterprise
PCs. Unfortunately the horses are already out of the barn, we do use WSUS
but WGA isnt updated via WSUS and based on some logging Ive done, I see
atleast 20 different versions of WGA installed (as far back as 1.3.0254.0) on
various PCs from when their last manual windows update was ran. At this
point it isnt clear if its a particular version causing the problem or
perhaps it only happens when windows decides it wants to revalidate and has
an old version. That wouldnt explain why PCs with deepfreeze that havent
changed in any way for alteast several months would want to revalidate but
thats a different issue.
The only solutions I can come up with are to either rip out WGA, which
someone could accidently put back or intentially put back if they needed to
download something manually from Microsoft. The other option would be to
always push out the the latest WGA update via a different process. This
would by no means be easy because half the machine have deepfreeze on them
and it doesnt guarentee it would fix the problem. The other problem with
this is that the most current version of the WGA update KB905474 v1.7.18.1
released 12/14/2007 does not have the most current version of files for WGA.
I already have PCs with 1.7.59.1 on them which begs the question of how I
automate the install of the latest version when there is no install for it.
I dont expect to ever figure out what caused it but Im at a loss as to how
to prevent it in the future and I cant have this continue to happen on a
large scale.
Id be happy to reopen the incident but since I cant recreate the problem, I
cant really tell what is happening. Based on what Im seeing, I dont believe
changing to a different VLK would have prevented this problem.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to troubleshoot this further or what to do
about it?
Thanks,
Dave