Winows Activation Circle of Hell

Learned from my last post a few things.
1) Focus on which keyboard and mouse you are using, involuntary deletions occur.
2) Don't stray towards areas I don't swim in regularly like development.
3) Never go against a Sicilain when death is on the line.

And clean up disk space running low on the laptop.

So now I am on PC #3 trying to get it activated because that's what you do with WIndows OS's.

Fine, the license is on the PC, I type it in and says thank you.
Problem is after a bunch of updates, from Microsoft's update page, it will not let me log in.

I get a this is not activated message. Click on it, goes in to activate and says it's done activtaing.
Then restarts me with the not activated error.
This is annoying, especially as I as doing what the system asked, getting updates from Microsoft to make my machine more secure and provid the most up to date versions of their code.

Good thing PC #2 is still alive, but #3 must get moving as it has a lot of work to do. Anyone have ideas? Haven't tried system restore yet. That's next.