XP requires reactivation in 3 days??

[oryx]

I recently (July 30) built a system with these specs:

ASUS A8N-E
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
Crucial (2 x 512MB) PC3200
GIGABYTE Geforce 7600 GS
Seagate Barracuda 120 GB SATA
NEC DVD R/RW IDE
NEC Floppy
FSP Group 400W ATXV12
Windows XP Home SP2
IN WIN Mid Tower C583T

Note: The OS has only been installed on this machine as per license requirements. System has been running well except for ... well this ...

When I booted this morning I got a message saying that significant hardware changes had occurred and that I had 3 days to reactivate XP. The problem is that I have not made any hardware changes. This happened also about 1 week ago, but that time I had been trying to install a wireless PCI card. I had trouble with the card, so I ended up removing it. After I removed the card was when I got the first reactivation message.

I have been successul reactivating, but if this keeps happening this is going to be an annoyance. I also hear there is a limit to the number of reactivations. If that's true, I would be dead in the water. What's going on here? Did Newegg send me a bogus disk? What can I do to fix this if this happens again?

[Jester]

it was the NIC you were trying to install. It changed the computers mac address and freaked out XP. You shouldn't have any more problems. I had this problem a while back with Adobe photoshop and Electronics Workbench Student Suite but that was because of a RAID 0 config in my system.

[oryx]

I hope you're right about the NIC, but it's happened twice since I pulled the card out. The first time I could understand; the second time I don't understand.

[MaxRat]

when you change it Xp thinks your changing hardware...Xp has a piont system for hardware change...

I have onboard NIC and if I go into the device manager and disable it then reboot and re-enable it upon next reboot I get the 3day pop-up...I think it's a flaw with xp because it doesnt fully recognize putting the old hardware back in after you tried something else...