Recently we had a motherboard failure on a terminal server so we replaced the faulty motherboard, re-setup the RAID arrays (same motherboard but still wouldn't recognize old RAID setup) and continued to recover the system from a previous backup.
No problem up to here, after restoring the system you are prompted to reboot and than login. On login we get a message box stating that Windows needs to be activated do you want to activate now, press yes but than the OS proceeds to log you off and do nothing at all. You can try over and over but to no avail.
Found a few articles about a glitch in the activation script and how to reset it, tried that with the same results. Hoping someone can share some knowledge if you have seen this before? Thanks!
Ok, so in case someone stumbles upon this entry, everything had to do with some corrupt IE8 related DLL files in the backup.
Finally figured out which ones and a quick re-install on IE8 seems to have done the trick.