Licensing employer's Office 2010 to run under XP Mode

MarshallAbrams said:

Is there someone at Microsoft to whom I can address this problem?

You could, but you wouldn't get anywhere - what you were initially told is correct. The XP Mode VM license for Windows that you acquire when you purchase a license for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate licenses just that - the virtual XP instance. Anything you install into that environment other than Windows itself needs to be licensed separately, and having Office installed on your Windows 7 machine and the Windows XP Mode virtual machine is still 2 installations, which is not allowed under the same license key unless that license key is a KMS key or a MAK key. If it was KMS, it would have activated against your KMS server automatically without entering a key (and stayed so for at least 90 - 120 days before trying to re-activate and potentially fail), so from what you've mentioned as the timeframe of this behavior it is definitely not a KMS key. If it was a MAK key, it would have activated at install time if the MAK key still had activations left on it, and they usually take far longer to fail (you'd see new activation attempts fail, rather than existing products dropping their activation this way). I would say again, given the behavior you've described, this does not seem to be a MAK key either. That leaves one possibility, and that is that this product key you are using is a one-license key (retail or OEM), and what you're doing violated that one-install license. Remember, just because it's a VM on a physical machine does not make it any less a machine - it's just virtual. Licensing of software in that XP Mode VM behaves exactly as it would a physical machine - if a retail or OEM key, you get one activation per installation, and if you activate twice, one of them will fail (and very soon thereafter).

When you typically install the copy of Office 2010, it doesn't ask you for a key. After a period of time, Office will tell you that the product is going to stop working without activation. At that point, you can enter your MAK key, and it will then launch a little mini installer and you should be activated.

Your employer may NOT be willing however to provide you with the MAK key for this second installation...as they likely have only puchased X # of licenses from Microsoft and this would increase their operating costs.