He says it was grueling, but in the article he says that reactivation "was easy enough" - doesn't sound like weeks of "troubleshooting", sounds like someone at MS just clarified what qualifies as a deactivation trigger. I have nothing against the activation - the only problem that I have is that MS claimed that it was because they were losing money to piracy. If that's true, activation should have reduced the cost of the software but it's still the same price as previous, non protected windows OS's sold for.