This may be a stupid question, but I'll give it a go anyways...

My brother has an older Dell Dimension (1100 i think), and he's pretty hard on it, so this is not the first time it's been wiped and had the OS reinstalled. We did our thing, reinstalled the XP professional, and then he went and got all the service packs, updated his drivers, etc.

Then we tried to activate the windows, and it won't let us. It syas the key has been entered incorrectly. I'm since finding out that Dells are apparently a whole new kind of fun with this- something about how they store information in the bios for the key?

Since we've got the xp disk in hand, I tried to find just another key, but same thing.

We're trying to track down the disk the dell came with, but it's a long shot.

So my questions-
1. Is this disk going to actually have anything of use on it?
2. Why will it not let me enter the key?
3. Is there anywhere else I can find a valid key? I read somewhere some vague information about a key being on a sticker on the computer, but we can't find it.
4. Is it possible that by updating the Service packs, drivers, etc- the computer no longer recognizes it as the correct key?

There is a limit to how many times a single key can be validated. How many times has this one been used?

Is the key you are using the same one that came with the computer?

Dell computers usually have a hidden recovery partition. Have you tried that? See here: http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/document?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&docid=3E48AE3870775D64E040A68F5B2877D4&journalid=50BEBE8B4022D958E040AE0AB5E14204&Query=&SystemID=&ServiceTag=&contenttype=&os=&component=&lang=&doclang=&toggle=&dl=

I don't know how many times it's been used, but it's very possible that it's "too many", that's why we tried using another key, but didn't have any luck with that one either.

It's not the same key it came with. I *think* it was originally xp home that was installed, not pro- we're wondering if this is causing problems.

This is the recovery that sets ot back to factory settings right? I think when we 'blew away' the computer, we probably deleted it. :S We've wiped away many computers before and never had this problem, so we didn't even think about it. I think the program is on the original disk though, one of the reasons we're trying to track it down.