How to manually associate product key with Office 2007?

Question

With some difficulties, I've been able to install Office 2007 onto Windows 2000.

After patching the environment variable to fool Office into thinking it was running on Windows XP, the annoying dialogs that said it wasn't supported went away, which didn't make sense because everything else worked just fine. However, I'm unable to activate Office and I only have 9 uses left.

I have a product key I've used with this successfully before on Windows XP; yet, my issue is that I cannot click in the form field in the Enter Your Product Key window. It is literally as if it were an image, rather than a clickable and typable field.

It was like this during Setup, so I just clicked Continue. I thought it might be resolved later, but that turned out to be wishful thinking.

I looked up the registry location of the Office 2007 product key, and apparently the key is encrypted, so I can't just write the product key to the registry and call it a day.

How can I "input"/associate my product key with Office 2007 without using the "Enter Your Product Key" dialog, since, clearly, it doesn't work?

Clarification: I'm not even talking about the activation process, merely making Office 2007 aware that there is a product key somehow.

Answer 1

Well, the solution to this is not at all intuitive, but this will fix the issue:

riched20.dll is the backbone of the Rich Text Format engine. That's used to display EULAs in Windows installers, so having the proper DLL is important.

1. Extract the riched20.dll file from the Windows 2000 install disc.
2. Navigate to C:\WINNT\system32. Replace the current version of riched20.dll with the one from the disc.
3. Windows will warn about Windows File Protection. Just ignore by clicking Cancel.

Close all Office programs and then reopen one. No restart or registry edits are necessary. The Enter Your Product Key window will now open and you can type in it.