Vista - Resetting 'secrets'

When I enter my product key to re-activate (required by MS) my 2 year old zista ultimate, I get an error message stating that "The maximum number of secrets that may be stored in a single system has been exceeded".
Is there a why to reset these 'so called' secrets?

Marvin
wcns@msn.com

I have installed Vista about 200/300 times over the past 2 1/2 years and
have never seen anything like what you describe.

How about a bit more information? Is this a legal retail copy? What strange
software have you installed that is not the norm?

--

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


"wcns" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:4a6536c243c4f7ca3f9149be1a34acca@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

That is what happens when you need to call by phone to activate. Speak to a real
person and explain. Activation Screen contains the 1-800 number you need to call

--
Peter

Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.

"wcns" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:4a6536c243c4f7ca3f9149be1a34acca@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

Error Message:

The maximum number of secrets that may be stored in a single system
has been exceeded. The length and number of secrets is limited to
satisfy United States State Department export restrictions.

Although YOU may not have installed encryption or encrypted software on your
machine (knowingly) ; encryption and/or limits may be installed in seemingly
innocent software.

Historical situations of just a few years ago mandated that US developed
software, by law, was restricted when it came to encryption above rather low
levels - when compared to commercially available software today.

Check your logs to see if you can narrow down the source of the error
message, then contact the vendor... otherwise, contact MS directly to see if
they have an explanation. A search of the "Web" shows this is not as
infrequent as you would think. So far, no simple solutions nor explanations
have surfaced.

wcns wrote:
That's a bit weird ...

Note, there's no specific need to re-activate Windows over any period;
*unless* the hardware changes in a way that makes Windows think it's
running on a new machine. So you probably changed something in teh
system to make re-activate spring into life. Some very innocent changes,
like plugging in a new hard disk, can tip Windows over the edge and make
it ask for re-activation.

When you get a new activation code from Microsoft and enter it into the
activation dialogue, Windows will encrypt the results in the activation
database.

Windows has a limit on how many encrypted objects it can store.
Encrypted objects can be things like files; or they can be more granular
objects which require individual encryption. The limit of encrypted
objects is 4096 (apparently to comply with some US Government laws, but
I'm not 100% sure of the background).

The message "The maximum number of secrets that may be stored in a
single system has been exceeded" is a standard Windows error message,
defined in Winerror.h in the Windows SDK; see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...85(VS.85).aspx

When you go to encrypt the 4097th object on your system, Windows will
throw up this error message.

Many other things can also encrypt objects on your system: such as any
software which uses Digital Rights Management ("DMR") to play music,
DVDs etc.

I'm guessing that something has created a fair bit of encrypted material
on your machine, and there's no room left to encrypt the new Activation Key.

But how you go about fixing it, in general terms, is hard to say (for me
anyway); I'd have to examine the machine and see what's there.

As a rough guess, I'd try uninstalling as much DRM-using software and
encryption applications as you can - hopefully that will remove the
encrypted "secrets" from the protected store as well. If not, personally
I'd back up my user data, then wipe and re-install Windows and
applications, and then restore my data from backup. Obvioulsy that's a
bit drastic, so try other stuff first.

Other folks might have extra info for you - hope this helps a bit.

Andrew
--
amclar at optusnet dot com dot au

I had something similiar about 2 years ago after a really bad crash, and
re installed the Vista OS, it gave me a similiar message when it started
for the first time "so to speak" I simply re installed with a clean
install and then had a problem with compressed boot, so did another
clean install and never had a problem since.. Personally, I would try a
complete clean re install , a couple of times,, either that or dheck the
validity of the 'DVD" ss Good Luck


--
jenak3769
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"wcns" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:4a6536c243c4f7ca3f9149be1a34acca@xxxxxx-gateway.com...It's a Zista Ultimate secret and can not be shared with the causual Zista
user.

On Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:15:05 -0500, wcns <guest@xxxxxx-email.com>
wrote:
Scan for malware. Try "malwarebytes" for a free version. There's never
a need to re-enter your product key and there are no "secrets".

I (Marvin Youngstrand - wcns@msn.com) am the poster of this issue. I am not familiar with the methods for communicating in forums.
1. How do I respond to all the great help I have received?
2. What are tags and polls, etc.?