Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program has been around since Windows XP, and I am sure that even if you have not personally experienced the pain caused by WGA you must have heard some of the horror stories.Last time I experienced a false positive WGA validation was about two years ago. And if you remember, at that time the validation failure was caused by installing/uninstalling applications and it was kind of odd that WGA would somehow accuse me of running non-authentic Windows software.
When I started my VM instance of Windows Vista earlier today, I was asked to validate my copy. This time the cause was equally intriguing. While I do not know for certain exactly what caused the validation to fail, I have a pretty good idea: It must be the “Autofit Window” and “Autofit Guest” option I use in VMWare. Since I like to leave my virtual machine running in a window (not full screen), I wanted to make sure that I had the most real estate available. So I was experimenting removing tool bars and status bars and adjusting a couple of other settings to see which way I like the most. I am not exactly sure why this would trigger the WGA validation failure, but it was the only “configuration” that I have changed since I created the VM a year ago.
It seems to me that in neither of my cases WGA validation should have failed. While both times I was re-validated after a simple mouse click, I wonder how many users there are who are not as lucky as me.
