WGA — Too Many False Positives

An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft insists that its Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is nearly flawless. But that's not the impression you get when you visit the company's WGA Validation Problems forum. Ed Bott at ZDNet went through 137 problem reports submitted there during a two-week period, each one accompanied by the output from the official Microsoft diagnostic utility, and found that 42% of the people reporting problems were actually running Genuine software. From the article: 'One large group consists of people who, for some unexplained reason, were displaying cryptographic errors related to digital signatures. The problem is so common, in fact, that Microsoft representatives have a canned response they paste into replies to forum visitors who appear to be showing false positives caused by these errors.' In a related story, the first WGA errors from Windows Vista and Office 2007 have appeared in the wild."

Vista WGA

[tomz16]

Haha... Vista RC1 just decided to stop working one day, even though I had a legit validated key from Microsoft (I called to have it activated).

I just booted it up one day, and it said "Your copy of windows is not activated". The best part is that it refused to accept the unlock key generated by the automated phone system!

Good thing I didn't have any important information locked up on it!

-Tom

Re:There are 10 kinds of people

[eln]

The original headline was "WGA giving 42% false positives." It was changed to its current version either before or shortly after it went live. Hence the GP.

Re:The Spin of the Dot

[Dynedain]

I'm glad Ed Bott was able to discern which people were using genuine software and which had copies. People can get copies from machine vendors without knowing it, you know. Did he have access to Microsoft's database?

If you RTFA, you'd see that they limited their survey to people on the WGA forum who were having problems and upon request ran MS's "WGA Diagnostic" utility and posted the results. That utility throws back one of 4 results: Genuine, Blocked VLK, Invalid Product Key, and Not Activated. So as far as MS is concerned, they are legit, and not copies, but the WGA program still flagged them as not legit because of things other software (like a McAffe "quick clean" product) did to their system.

Re:Made Up Statistics

[Anonymous Coward]

8 out of 10 people who say that are lying.

My WGA experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent a weekend fixing my brothers Dell computer that suddenly started reporting that it wasn't genuine. After fearing the worst (a spambot) and after much effort and some unhelpful calls to India for support and Windows activation I determined that M$ had pushed down an bad update that broke ActiveX which WGA apparently REQUIRES to run. After re-registering a bunch of M$ DLLs Windows update and WGA worked again and guess what the first update M$ wanted to push onto the machine was, you guessed it, an update to WGA. Probably to fix the problem they created in the first place. WGA is a joke and whoever wrote the code for it should be shot.

WGA locking legitimate users out

[jonasj]

I worked in a small local computer shop for a couple of months this summer. The following happened to me two times during that period.

Some customer would bring in a computer that wouldn't start. We determined that the motherboard was faulty, and replaced it with a similar one.

Windows starts up, everything works, except it wants to be re-activated again. Online activation fails, so I phone Microsoft, enter the forty-something digit number, reads the product key to someone, who then tells me that they are very sorry, but no, for some reason they cannot give me a re-activation code, so I will have to reinstall Windows in order to get it working with that product key. However, changing the product key works fine.

So I call the customer and explain the situation to them, and let them choose between:
1) me taking their harddisk out, attaching it to our backup machine, backing up all their stuff, reinstalling Windows, and all their programs, and all updates, then restoring the backups, and
2) buying a new xp home license,

they both chose option 2. That way they would get their machine back with their entire configuration intact, and if they chose option 1, all that work I would have to do would take so long time that they wouldn't be saving much anyway, compared to buying a new license.

This only happened these two times; most times when we replaced a motherboard, either the reactivation over the internet would work, or the phone representative would give a working reactivation code.

But these two customers payed for a new XP Home license even though they owned a fully legal one already.

My experience

[Spad]

I've had exactly this problem - my copy of Windows is as genuine as you can get (MSDNAA Download) and yet WGA still reports it as being an illegal copy. What's stupid is that Windows Update, the WGADiag tool *and* the Firefox WGA Tool MS provide all identify it as Genuine.

I've used one of the many hacks (Removing execute permission for the Local System account to the WGA files and then deleting them) to remove WGA from my machine and now I only use MBSA [microsoft.com] for my patching. It's a little long winded, but it's infinitely better than the hassle of being repeatedly told that my copy of windows is illegal when it clearly isn't.

RTFS

[tshak]

That's 42% of the 137 reported problems, not 42% of of all WGA installations.

Re:No point whining

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux with crossover office. WE run all of those PLUS the Crestron Suite of apps for automation programming under linux + crossover office.

Oh wait, you did not even try did you.

Re:Why exactly would you install the WGA update?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to install WGA to use Windows Update.

So, either you can get security updates + risk WGA; or you can go unpatched.