Activating a Repair Install Windows XP

I've recently upgraded my laptop and in order to keep all of my installed software (especially one-time promotional software from Giveaway of the Day) I created an image of my harddrive to copy across to my new laptop. Unfortunately, with my new laptop being a dual-core and my previous laptop only a Celeron, Windows suddenly found that it didn't have all the drivers installed that it needed and refused to boot. The only recovery from this was to run a Windows XP repair install which did the trick perfectly. However, because my system configuration had changed dramatically Windows activation had been reset. When I tried to log in I was now greeted by a dialogue box informing me that my copy of Windows was not activated and needed activating before I could use it. That's fine by me, my Windows product key is valid, so I was happy to go ahead. Except for one problem; when I tried to use the Windows Activation tool my laptop just appeared to freeze up.

The first thing I tried was booting into safe mode, but this was a no go because "Windows cannot be activated in safe mode". So I could neither log in or activate Windows in safe mode or normal loading. After much hunting online, and nearing the point where I was just going to reinstall everything from scratch, I discovered a very useful piece of information; Windows activation is dependent on Internet Explorer. Of course by repairing my Windows installation I had reverted to the default version 6 of Internet Explorer that is built into Windows XP. Except I hadn't reverted properly because obviously some of the IE6 files were overwritten by IE8 files. So I knew what the problem was. Next question was how to reinstall Internet Explorer so that I could run the activation program and get into Windows again.

Now here's the really cheeky bit! A little more research turned up a forum post that described how to get into an expired activation Windows. It turns out that although Windows won't let you log in via a normal boot or through safe mode, if you choose to boot into 'Safe Mode with Command Line' you can then run 'explorer' from the CMD line and your Windows desktop will load just as if you were in safe mode! 

From here I installed IE8, rebooted and when I tried to activate normally, low and behold the activation window appeared and I could complete the activation procedure and log into Windows normally. It took me an entire evening to work out but this knowledge has proved indispensable as I've put it to use on another occasion since then. For all those of you struggling with this, or a similar problem, I hope this saves you the hours I spent trying to find a solution!