Several days ago I started getting nagged by Vista, telling me it was having trouble activating.  Last night Vista got nastier and eventually said it was running in degraded mode.  For one thing it turned off the Aero feature.  It also turned off the ability to download updates.
 
The attached articles says this was due to human error at Microsoft several days ago.  Today I went through multiple attempts to re-activate online, and finally succeeded.
 
I know of one colleague in ACNS who experienced the same thing, and I was wondering if others had.  As of this morning the ACNS Help Desk hadn't had calls on it yet.
 
/rich

Microsoft Blames WGA Meltdown on Human Error

Gregg Keizer   Today's Top Stories    or  Other Operating Systems Stories  
 
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September 03, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Microsoft Corp. last week blamed "human error" on the part of its IT staff for a server problem that caused the company's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation service to incorrectly tag legitimate users of Windows XP and Windows Vista as software pirates.

The software vendor also promised that internal changes are being made to avoid a repeat of the glitch, which affected users for nearly 20 hours on Aug. 24 and 25. Users whose copies of Windows erroneously failed WGA's antipiracy tests were prevented from downloading most software from Microsoft's Web site. And those with Vista were unable to use some of the operating system's features.

Alex Kochis, Microsoft's senior WGA product manager, wrote in a blog posting that the troubles began after "preproduction code" was installed on live servers.

Those systems had yet to be upgraded with another code change designed to enable stronger encryption and decryption of product keys, Kochis added. As a result, "the production servers declined activation and validation requests that should have passed," he wrote.