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Recently I was trying to find a way to get rid of Office 2003 activation on every reinstall of Office, meanwhile googling for this I found this patch.  I was surprized to know that even such a patch exists. Hackers have managed to defeat the Office product activation.

The patch works as follows:

1. Install your Office XP/2003 as usual.
2. Download the Patch to your desktop or any other convinient location.
3. Extract and Run the file ‘Anti-MSOPA.exe’ inside the folder.

It will patch the files ‘mso.dll’ in your [programs]\common files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE11\ and [programs]\common files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE10\mso.dll directories.

P.S. Use at your own risk. I have not tested the procedure.

Related: Disable Office 2003 Activation

First of all this is not a crack or patch for Office 2003 activation. This is a to get rid of the activation process at every reinstall of Office.

Recently I reinstalled Windows and so I have to reinstall Office 2003 also. After installation when I fired up MS Word, a window popped up asking to activate the Office. Now it is very annoying that one has to activate it on every reinstall. This is also extra burden for people like me who are on a limited Internet connection.

So after some self-research and googling I managed to find a way to bypass this. Below is the workaround.

• Install Office 2003 as usual and activate it over Internet. (This is the last time you have to do this).
• Create a folder named ‘Disable Office 2k3 activation’ on your desktop. Navigate to the folder ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE11′  or Enter ‘%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE11′ in your ‘Start>Run’ box and locate the file ‘mso.dll’. Only this file is modified after activating Office. Some installations have this file only in the folder above and some also have in ‘OFFICE10′ folder. Copy this file and paste in the folder created above.
• Download the winxp Command Script ‘Disable_O2k3_act.cmd’ and save in the same folder ‘Disable Office 2k3 activation’.

Now burn this folder on your Office 2003 CD and after every reinstall of Office run this Command Script to automatically activate your Office installation.

Related: Anti Product Activation Patch for Office XP/2003