Windows XP Product Key Viewer

Purpose

This program displays the Windows Activation Key and Product ID on Windows XP. I was fed up that Microsoft haven't provided a feature to view this data easily on Windows XP. A commercial program is available to do this but all it does is read and simply decode the activation key value from the registry and read the product ID straight from the registry. Other programs I have downloaded to do this would not run on my Pentium 4 Prescott CPU - both were probably based on some early decode function with a buffer overflow error in it.

Screenshot

I have blocked out my values in this screenshot...

Notes

An administrator can enter a valid activation key using the Windows Product Activation dialog. Keys are supplied with legitimate versions of Windows XP or in some cases by phoning a Microsoft representative to receive a new key.

The program works on Windows 2000 but Windows Product Activation does not operate in the same way on 2000.

If Windows is already activated, set the following registry key to be able to enter a new key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WPAEvents]
"OOBETimer"=hex:ff,ff,ff,ff,ff,ff,ff