Office Pro 2003 new install-Product Key different than COA

[MrAldo]

I bought a sealed copy of Office Professional 2003 and installed it on Windows 7. The first attempt didn't prompt for a Product Key and went ahead and installed without it. Once installed, it showed that Office 2003 was activated (not trial, but activated). Using Belarc, I found the Product Key and it was different from the one shown on the COA. That same Belarc-reported Product Key showed up in an Internet search where several users reported having that same key. At first, I thought I might be dealing with counterfeit software even though the CD and COA all look very legit.

Upon digging further, I found that I wasn't prompted for a Product Key because I directly ran setup.exe instead of letting Autoplay run. Autoplay first runs a script that asks for the Product Key. So, I uninstalled Office 2003 and reinstalled it, this time turning off UAC to allow autoplay to run its script and sure enough I got a Product Key dialog box and entered the key from the COA. After that second installation, I checked and the program was activated. BUT, running Belarc again showed the same (different than COA)Product Key as before. I get the same results from ProduKey (another key finder).

Is it possible that once an Office program is no longer actively sold and supported by Microsoft, they really don't care about registration and simply return a default Product Key, and resultant Product ID, for all installations of that software?

 

[byundt]

Daniel Petri gives instructions for changing the CD-Key associated with Office in this webpage:

http://www.petri.co.il/change_office_xp_cd_key.htm#

The setup.ini file may have a key preloaded in it. Daniel Petri describes how to do that on:

http://www.petri.co.il/install_office_2003_without_supplying_the_cd_key.htm

 

[MrAldo]

I checked each instance of setup.ini and found no Product Key info.

I then went into registry to change the Product Key, but did not find any registration entry at the usual location. I found that Windows 7 64-bit stores it in a different place. See

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895456/en-us

Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Registration I did not find an entry with the Product Key, so I went ahead and deleted the entire Registration folder from registry, then launched Word and clicked Activate Product, and it asked for the Product Key. I entered the code from the COA on the CD case and it registered it and assigned a new Product ID. Neither the new Product Key or Product ID can be found with an Internet search, and Belarc now reports the correct COA Product Key, so I think I am good to go. I checked registry and the full Registration folder is back in place.

So, what caused the problem in the first place? No idea. Maybe launching with setup.exe and bypassing the Product Key script results in a trial version which used the "popular" Product Key, but somehow Microsoft didn't properly report it as a trial version.