**UPDATED: October 4th.

 One of the versions that Microsoft sells of Windows is known as the Corporate Edition (XP), Business Edition (Vista), Enterprise Edition (W7).  In a nutshell, all there of these versions are same version level with just a name change depending on the flavor of Windows that you speaking about. These versions are not sold in the store and activate slightly differently (Called Volume License) than what users of other flavors of Windows are used to.

Normally Volume License versions can activate against a KMS-enabled machine in your corporate environment or against Microsoft online servers using a MAK.  MAKs are special keys that are installed after your Vista installation is complete.

I have had a couple of customers with Volume License versions that have had issues activating the installed version of Windows because of error 0X8007232B / DNS Name does not exist and clicking on Activate now or change product key did nothing.

I did a lot of searching online for a solution and most solutions pointed to a Microsoft Document about “How to Activate Volume License” which did not actually had a solution for the issue.  I finally discovered a solution that worked for me:

***You need to go to Control Panel –> User Accounts –> Change User account control settings –> and move the level to Never notify….security will block the steps below unless you drop the UAC control.  **NOTE: If you change this to Never notify you will not receive the security prompts built into Windows. Advance user will probably like that but non-experienced user will want to put the setting back once you complete the activation process. 

Once you change the User Account Control setting do the following

1) At a command prompt (Start –> Run –> CMD), type slmgr.vbs –ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX (With a space between vbs and –ipk and Where the XXXXX is your assigned Volume License number). You will need to show a little patients as it will take a little bit (1 to 2 minutes usually) but you will get the response that “The product key was successfully changed”.

2) Now at the same command prompt, type slmgr.vbs –ato (a space between .vbs and –ato) and after a few seconds (This one will be much faster)a message that “The product had been activated” will appear.

That’s all there is to resolving this issue.