Solving Office (or Outlook) Activation Unspecified Error 0x80070190

While recently installing Outlook on some desktops, I immediately hit a problem with the Microsoft Product activation system, getting a rather unhelpful error message stating  “An unspecified Error has occurred. Your request cannot be processed at this time. Please try again later. ( 0x80070910 )“:

Office Activation Error 0x80070190

I checked the usual issues in this situation such as system clock time, timezone settings and Internet connectivity and everything checked out.

A quick search online showed quite a few people having the same problem – it seems that the bug was introduced in Office Service Pack 2 (SP2) and requires a simple work around.

The Solution

Simply open a command prompt with elevated privileges – contrary to lots of the discussion I read out there regarding this, it’s as simple as right clicking on the Command Prompt option and selected Run As Administrator.

You will then be presented with a black box with a blinking cursor in it.  Depending on your version of Windows (click here for help if you don’t know), you need to paste in one of the two commands below and press enter (to paste in to a Command Prompt window, right click in it and select Paste):

For 32 bit versions of Windows

cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

For 64 bit versions of Windows

cscript “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

After a short wait (it can take a couple of minutes so be patient) you will  see a confirmation message like the one below: