Originally Posted by Angry Jew Cat

No, I'm not a total noob. It's not malware of that type. It's a genuine windows error box I am seeing. I've had the computer for a little over a year now. I get a popup saying that i may be the victim of software counterfeiting, click here for more info, yadda yadda, and i go straight to the microsoft genuine software validation page at http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/. When I attempt to validate windows, my validation fails and it tells me I won't be able to take advantage of certain windows features like auto updates.

The only software I've installed recently is the 60-day trial for Microsoft Office from the Microsoft downloads site. I'm looking into the possibility that it could be a software incompatibility issue somewhere, but I just can't see it. Anything I suspect even a little to be a possible security threat I run in a virtual machine on my Linux box.

That's what lead me to wonder if someone running a cracked version of Vista elsewhere is possibly using the same serial number.