To WGA Hell (and Back)!

As a veteran Windows developer I’d say I’m more or less confident of my ability to extricate myself from even the most complex failure scenarios. Flaky hard disk? Been there. Corrupted Driver Database? No sweat. In fact, after nearly 20 years of running some variant of the New Technology kernel, you might even call me a bit “smug.” I wear my NT scars with a sense of pride that only an early adopter can evoke.

So you can imagine my surprise when a simple headline – “Windows Genuine Advantage Suffers Worldwide Outage” – sent me cowering behind my daughter’s giant stuffed unicorn. WGA. My nemesis. The bane of my otherwise placid existence. The one failure scenario that I (nearly) couldn’t recover from. Locked out of my system … my desperate mouse clicks falling on the deaf ears of the WGA web site. The sense of impotence! The horror!

But I digress. Suffice to say, I’m terrified of WGA, and for good reason. A few weeks back I made the mistake of installing a pre-release copy of a Microsoft hotfix for Windows Vista. The patch, so graciously provided to me by my contacts within the company’s core development team, was designed to correct a design flaw with the Plug & Play driver database. Unfortunately, in their zeal to squelch the issue (of which I had already written prodigiously), the developer providing the fix forgot to digitally sign the code for external use. This, in turn, caused the installer to complain that I needed to enable the “testsigning” option in the Vista Boot Loader before it would work. Eager to test the fix, and oblivious to the hell-storm I was about to unleash upon myself, I proceeded to experiment with the bcdedit utility until I managed to get the option enabled.

Then I rebooted. This next part of the story still gives me chills. After logging-in I was presented with a dialog box warning me that I had modified my system in an unapproved fashion and that my copy of Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit was no longer “genuine.” The combination of the unsigned/pre-release hotfix and my hacking of the Boot Loader’s parameters had somehow triggered WGA. I was now trapped in the surreal world of accused software pirates and warez script kiddies, and no matter what I tried I couldn’t seem to find an exit.

Note: The environment I’m describing wasn’t some “reduced functionality” desktop. I was presented with a single dialog box, and the only option available – visit the WGA web site to revalidate my copy of Windows – was failing every time. There was no desktop. No Task Manager. Nothing even remotely hinting of a solution (beyond reinstalling from scratch). I was dead in the water.

But just when the situation looked hopeless – my Star Trek-loving goose thoroughly cooked – I recalled the words of everyone’s favorite pointy-eared Vulcan: “I’ve been dead before.” I also recalled a technique I’d mastered during my previous struggles with the aforementioned driver database corruption issue (i.e. the very problem this “hotfix” was supposed to address – oh, the irony). To cut to the chase, I booted Vista to the “rescue” console (press F8 at boot and select the Command Line option) and, after much fiddling with bcdedit, I was able to get the Boot Loader flag reset to its default value (thus disabling the hotfix). A few more reboots and I was able to remove the offending hotfix package and revalidate my copy of Vista.

In summary: I really hate WGA. Not because I hate Microsoft (I don’t). Not because I begrudge them their revenue or the right to protect their intellectual property (hey, I’m a commercial developer, too). No, I hate WGA because it’s unpredictable. You never know what might set it off. And as my experience demonstrates, the results can be truly disastrous (it would have taken weeks to fully reconstruct this particular system’s well-tuned build environment).

So, when you read one of those scary WGA headlines (like Microsoft’s global validation framework going offline, leaving anyone faced with a WGA-triggered re-validation scenario high and dry), please try to remember the words of the Microsoft Genuine Software web page: “Microsoft Genuine software gives you … the confidence that you are getting the experience you expect.”

And get your own giant stuffed unicorn. This one’s taken.