Slui.exe doesn't display menu to change product key.

My Windows 10 Pro x86-64 machine all of a sudden had a deactivated key. I called MS Tech Support who got on my system remotely and gave me a new key. Originally I had a digital key when I upgraded from Windows 8.1.

In the course of Tech Support trying to change my key we found out that slui.exe doesn't produce any menu. On a VM test machine it does bring up the change key menu. Slui.exe 3 seems to bring up the same menu and also doesn't work on my production machine. However slui.exe 4 does work on my production machine. This brings up the Country and Region menu. I haven't tried any of number.

All the other ways to change the key don't work either. The one in Settings|Update & Security|Activation is just one example. I assume all it does is execute slui.exe.

I checked the permissions of slui.exe against the one on my VM test system. They were identical. Any idea on how to get slui working again? Perhaps it's a Registry entry problem. For such a minor problem reinstalling Windows is not an option.

Thanks.

slui 3 doesn't work either. It appears from my VM testing that slui and slui 3 produce the change key menu. Like I said slui 4 works.

None of the methods in the tutorial work.

I think the MS Tech Rep tried all of the methods in your tutorial including 5 with no success. She finally had to use the Phone Call method and perhaps something else. It would have been a lot easier if slui worked.

Does slui.exe need to be registered?

alphanumeric said:

What happens, or doesn't happen with options 1 and 2?

Nothing happens with 1 or 2. I also tried slui /? hoping to get a help menu but nothing here either.

alphanumeric said:

Might want to run the system file checker. Best guess is a system file associated with activation has been mangled. Or you PC is infected/compromised. What were you doing when activation failed?

I did run sfc /scannow which found no errors. I don't think I ever had to run slui to change a key so I don't know when it stopped working. After I upgraded from 8.1 to 10 for free and got a digital license slui might have run transparently as part of the upgrade process at that time.

Just a note, I tried slui.exe on my production machine with Version 1703 Build 15063.540 and it worked but had to be careful to close/cancel a blue panel that appeared over the panel desired.