A lot of people have been experiencing problems activating their Office Beta 2 installations lately. Apparently the sheer volume of activations worldwide has been causing a problem with Microsoft's activation servers. If the newsgroups are any indication, this has in turn caused many people to get a bit, well, frustrated.

I've been using the beta for a few months now, and I recently installed the technical refresh. And even though I know it's beta software, the stuff is so compelling I've really gotten accustomed to using it every day. I'm using Outlook 2007 for email, Word 2007 for documents, Excel 2007 for spreadsheets - you get the picture.

So, when my system crashed and I had to reinstall the beta, imagine my chagrin when it failed to activate. To add insult to injury, each time I tried to activate, a message box would appear saying either that my Internet connection was broken (which it wasn't) or that the activation servers were offline for maintenance. Meanwhile, the usage counter would decrease by one. When it got down to 3 uses, I panicked and started scouring the Internet for a solution.

Low and behold - here is an approach that works. It was buried in a KB article dealing with a different, but related problem of using Office 2007 via Terminal Services. Basically, the solution is to use a special product key that does not require activation.

Here is the magic key:

RQCRJ-FCTYM-V3PDF-GRD46-9YHXQ

And here is a link to the KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925098

So, instead of installing the product using the product key given to you when you downloaded the beta, use this product key instead. Then, when you run an office program, it will not prompt you for activation.

"What if I've already installed the application?", I hear you say. Well, as noted in the KB article, there is another approach that involves registry tweaking. You can go that route, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're comfortable with manually editing the registry.

Unfortunately for me, I had already tried to uninstall the beta without much success. It appears that uninstalling the Office 2007 beta is no easy feat. It's kind of like a 'dirty bomb' when it lands on your system, leaving lots of crud in hard-to-reach places.

But no worries. MS has provided a solution to this as well. It's called the "Windows Installer Cleanup Utility". Now this is a real godsend.

When you run it, a dialog appears showing all your installed programs - even ones that do not appear in the Add/Remove Programs list. From here, you can easily remove the extra entries that don't get removed when the product is uninstalled.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs

2. Uninstall Office Professional Plus (Beta Two)

3. Run the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility

4. Remove any remaining entries that reference Office Beta Two

5. Re-install the Office Beta using the public product key RQCRJ-FCTYM-V3PDF-GRD46-9YHXQ

6. Re-apply the B2TR patch

And "voila"! Back up and running with all the bells and whistles.

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