I bought a computer for the kitchen (after I got an expensive, very good LCD 19" monitor very cheap my wife gave in...), and it has almost the same chipset family as my HTPC (965 vs. 975), so I simply took one of the HT images and restored that to the kitchen pc. But you can't have a kitchen PC where the user name is "Cinema Inferno", so I changed it. And got bombed out of MC with a message that the trial period was out.
Trying to restore the lisence didn't help at all, it couldn't find the correct registry entries. Going back to the original user name didn't help either. So I have removes MC totally, deleted that user, created a new user and installed from scratch. Still same problem.
I could install 11 and restore the lisence for that without any problems, and I sort of hope that it's stable enough so that it doesn't crash on my wife. Believe me, one BSOD on mrs. Mastiff, and I'll be back in the stoneage again, with a regular TV on the kitchen instead of a computer...
The PC is a m-ATX motherboard with a celeron 2.8, 256 meg 400 mHz DDR RAM, a very quiet PSU and CPU cooler, 80 gig harddisk in a Quiet PC enclosure, so it won't be audible in the cupboard, and it won't be visible either. It will never be off, I'll use STR for it.
Any advice?