Windows wants to activate after removing viruses and malware

Hi all.

I was working on someone's HP PC. They have WinXP Home SP2. Their computer was sluggish and giving continuous virus alerts.

I didn't bother booting up the PC because I had worked on it before and knew it would be annoyingly sluggish to work on. I decided to remove the hard drive and boot off a WinXP pro machine using the infected HD as secondary. I removed 97 viruses (scanned with mcafee 7.1). I ran Adaware and removed some more files. I didn't let Adaware scan the registry because I wasn't sure it would look at the infected HD's registry or the registry of the HD I was booting from.

I started a defrag (went about 3 or 5 %...Can't remember) then I decided it would be best to boot the HD back in its original computer and do that after doing some more cleaning up.

I went to boot the previously infected HD up in its original PC and I got a message saying "This copy of windows must be activated with Microsoft...before you can log in." (I don't have the entire message written down)

I clicked Yes to activate and the screen just hangs the edges of a window displaying and I can see the background through the middle.

I am wondering if my defrag did something to some files on the HD or it was one of the files that were removed from deleting infected files. I also went through the locations that viruses/malware were found and removed more suspicious files (after checking properties and looking them up on the internet). I also know from doing this in the past that there are some files that always show up as newer files and I always leave...system related files.
However, I know I am not perfect and maybe I deleted something I shouldn't have...I don't know.

I have tried contacting Microsoft and HP and (the PC is over 5 years old) they want money for phone support or I can try their online support for free. I may try that but first I thought I would post and see what advice I can find.

I already checked the internet a bit and tried regsrv32 on a few files ir ran fine but didn't help the situation.
I tried restoring from a previous date and that didn't work.
I checked the wpa.bak and wpa.dbl files and they are there...I don't know what to do with them if they are bad (Apparently they are the files that XP keeps that verifies information on whether windows needs to be activated...or something like that)

I read there is an option to install XP over the top of the previous version and haven't tried that yet.

I need your help.

Thank you.

 

See my quote above ^. I let the computer sit for quite a while and I never get more than the frame of a window for activation. I don't see a phone number or any other information because there is no 'inside' to the window.

Any other ideas?

 

The person who owns the PC could not find their XP Home CD. I have a WinXP Pro.

Can WinXP Pro be used to fix, repair, or install XP Home back on to the PC?

 

Ok, the activation problem is fixed.

Thanks Arie for your pointed reply .

In c:\windows\system32, there are two files wpa.dbl and wpa.bak.

I renamed the wpa.dbl to wpa.tmp and then renamed wpa.bak to wpa.dbl. I then rebooted and no activation window or message was displayed.

Incidentally, the file sizes for the wpa files were really far off so I thought that maybe the wpa.dbl original file may have been corrupted.

Originals:
wpa.dbl 10kb
wpa.bak 2.5kb

There are still such a large number of things wrong with the PC that I plan on just re-installing XP Home as soon as she can find a suitable CD (hers are missing). I may call HP and find out how much a new set of CDs cost for the PC.

Thanks