Month: January 2019

An (old) ugly problem rears its ugly head

martyov99Leave a comment

We ran into an issue yesterday that continued into today that is an oldie but a goody… Windows 7 computers started showing up with a black background and claiming that “This Copy of Windows is not Genuine.” It’s one of those things that when you see it you immediately start to look at the KMS server to make sure that it’s accepting connections and is working correctly. It was.

We contacted Microsoft, and before we even had an engineer assigned our TAM had responded with a solution. The problem is a KB (KB971033) installed on Enterprise Windows 7 systems that was meant for retail versions of Windows 7.

the KB is from 2010 and doesn’t even exist in our SCCM updates, so the computers that have it must have gotten it from some lawless time when they were being updated in a different way. Apparently it started causing problems again yesterday, but looking through the web I was able to find several others that have had the problem surface at random times through the years.

Anyway, here are the instructions on how to fix the problem.

Here is the procedure that you need to follow –

  1. Uninstall KB971033 (if it is still installed)
  2. Reboot the machine
  3. Run this commands manually, or through a .bat script on ONLY problematic Windows 7 Enterprise machines.
net stop sppuinotify
sc config sppuinotify start= disabled
net stop sppsvc 
del %windir%\system32\7B296FB0-376B-497e-B012-9C450E1B7327-5P-0.C7483456-A289-439d-8115-601632D005A0 /ah 
del %windir%\system32\7B296FB0-376B-497e-B012-9C450E1B7327-5P-1.C7483456-A289-439d-8115-601632D005A0 /ah 
cd %windir%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareProtectionPlatform
ren tokens.dat tokens.oldbad
cd cache
ren cache.dat cache.oldbad
net start sppsvc 
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk 33PXH-7Y6KF-2VJC9-XBBR8-HVTHH 
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato
sc config sppuinotify start= demand

The key above is for Windows 7 Enterprise specifically, if you have other editions please refer to the following article and change the product key in the above command.

KMS Client setup keys – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/kmsclientkeys