Recently I had a strange “Vista” experience. A colleague asked me to troubleshoot a machine running windows Vista Enterprise 32bit, joined in Windows2003server domain environment. The previous evening he changed his password and shut down the Computer. On the next morning he turned on the PC, successfully logged on with his new password. The “nice” surprise was, that vista started with the default setting just as it starts for the first time. His profile with all his settings was gone. All of the “new user” wizards, prompts and windows appeared on the screen as if the user was logging on ...

Recently I had an exhausting experience with Windows Vista activation that I’d like to share.

Some background info: In the beginning of the year we received the official release of Windows Vista Ultimate via MSDN. The license allowed installing the software on ten computers. We used all the licenses on machines for testing and development. The other computers I reinstalled with Vista Enterprise edition that came later with a volume license key. I couldn’t believe what happened during the weeks to come.. In a few days three of the machines running Windows Vista Ultimate had the same problem, caused by ...