Microsoft Office cannot verify the license for this product. Microsoft Office 2016 on Windows 10 2004

Question

We are upgrading our workstations from Windows 10 1903 to Windows 10 2004. Once upgraded we launch Microsoft Office 2016 applications and they display the msg. Microsoft Office cannot verify the license for this product. Excel does still open without issue. Excel also shows activated and if I run ospp.vbs it shows the MSOffice2016 is activated through ADUC successfully. I have tried all the switches for ospp.vbs without luck. I have tried the compatibility troubleshooting but that does not fix the issue. I tried repairing office but get an error 1603. I have tried rearming the activation and get a 0x8007005 Access Denied. This is only happening to 20% of our upgraded workstations. If we reimage a machine from scratch with windows 10 2004 and office 2016 we have zero issues. The only fix i have found was to roll back the version of windows to 1903. That does resolve the issue. Is there a permissions issue, reg entry or file that could be causing this issue?

Answer 1

@daniel geromini

Could you please tell me what’s the version of Office? It would be best to have a screenshot.
You may go to one Office app>File>Account>About…

You could try to right-click an Office application then run Office app as administrator and update Office to see if the problem still exists.

If it doesn’t work, maybe you could try as below to enable Software Protection (sppsvc.exe).
Press Windows + R in the search bar, type ‘regedit’, click ‘OK’.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\sppsvc.
Find the key ‘DelayedAutoStart’ from the navigation pane at the right. Double-click it, set its value from ‘1’ to ‘0’.
Find the key ‘Start’, double-click it and change its value to ‘2’.
Find the key ‘Type’, double-click it, set its value to ‘20’.
After applying the changes, restart your computer. Please make sure that you have an active internet connection.
Note: It is better to back up your registry before you make any changes.

Besides, is there any third-party security software on the computers that have the issue?
If yes, please check whether it has been updated to the latest or try to temporarily exit this security software.

Regards,
Erin

---

If an Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Answer 2

I found another TID were someone had the exact same issue after upgrading Windows. They would receive the activation verification msg each time they launched office. They downloaded https://www.tweaking.com/content/page/windows_repair_all_in_one.html and ran the Repair Tool to fix their issue. I downloaded this on my test machine and performed the Registry Reset Permissions option. Its hard to tell but it would appear that the tool is using SETACL.exe to add administrators group and the system account to both the HKLM and HKU hives. I say its hard to tell because once its finished I am comparing permissions on that machine with a machine that didn't run the script and permissions look the same. However it is making some change because it fixed the issue. I am now able to open EXCEL or WORD and the license verification msg is gone. I am also able to uninstall / install office 2016 on windows 10 2004 without the 1603 error msg. There seemed to be some permissions issues within the registry post upgrade to 2004.

WINDOWS REPAIR - Registry Reset Permissions does reference the sppsvc key permissions. I can't upload the txt file it uses for the changes because its 340 mb. Do we know the exact key that would be referenced during a license verification procedure? For me its like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you happen to know that info I would be interested in just making the permissions change to that key to see if it fixes my issues. I hate running this Windows Repair tool from tweaking. Makes me nervous to use in an enterprise environment even though I see HP and Microsoft reference it frequently as a safe tool.