What do you mean I'm not Activated!?
After some deliberating, I finally convinced myself that I needed to upgrade my home computer from WinXP to Vista. I went for the clean install instead of the upgrade, so that I could keep my XP environment in palce, should I need to fall back - plus, I love the opportunity for a clean start..
The install went rather smoothly. The only gotcha was the need to provide my SATA RAID controller driver. I was extremely delighted to see that Vista supported removable drives (thumb drives), since I tore my floppy drive out a year ago.
After finally getting my wireless USB adaptor to work, I was able to successfully activate my copy of Vista. That was all about 2 weeks ago. Yesterday, I decided to install some updates, and noticed that my SATA RAID driver was available as an optionsl driver. I happilly installed it, and rebooted.. To my dismay, upon rebooting, Vista deemed that my hardware had so drastically changed that my activation was no longer valid. And of course, I couldn't activate online since "This key has already been activated". I got it re-activated after speaking to Microsoft Support, but I couldn't get them to understand that I believe the cause of the problem was the driver update.. and this may/should be considered a bug, or at least a warning for anyone downloading it. So, consider this my public service announcement.
If you have already activated Windows Vista, and you see an optional driver update for your SATA RAID controller, proceed with caution. You may spend the next hour on the phone (or chat), getting a new activation key.