I recently bought the Windows XP Professional Upgrade version, to upgrade my XP Home computer. The Upgrade went just fine, but then when I tried to activate it I had a problem. I also could not enter an address into the address bar of Internet Explorer
I spent hours pulling my hair out trying to figure out why it would not activate, and possibly would have cast myself out the window. Then I stumbled upon this post in a Microsoft forum. It solved my problem and it looks like a lot of other people’s as well. I have the instructions here too, simplified a little bit.
If XP Pro will not activate (an error report box appears after you click Activate Windows) and you had Internet Explorer 7 installed before installing the upgrade, do the following -
- Go to My Computer
- Click Tools->Folder Options…
- Click the View tab
- Click “Show hidden files and folders”
- Close My Computer
- Click Start->Run
- Enter the following command without the quotes “%windir%\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe”
- Follow the steps to remove IE 7 and then restart your computer
You should now be able to activate Windows and Explorer will work. The problem must be that XP Pro trys to install the old version of Internet Explorer and that goofs everything up.
