Clean install complete. :) Wow, things are running much faster now. :D

Sorry, here's my report.

198210

It says "The Software Protection service failed to start." -- that's not by my choosing, this just started the other day, along with Windows Defender being...

Same issue as OP, and I'm tending to agree with @Vellaura.

Running "slmgr /dlv" in an Admin CMD returns an error for me.

Update:
Ran the Activation Diagnostic tool from the forums and the...

Previous message with extra line breaks removed:

Yes, this works. I've previously removed Cortana, but this was still an issue. As an update note, on 25-Oct-2016 Windows self repaired this...