I've had this issue even with a brand new license, bought direct from the Microsoft website.....something I'll never do again. They took the best part of 7 hours on chat going through all the normal tests (change of hardware, etc.) and still could/would not reactivate my license (even though they could clearly see that I'd got the transaction on my account purchase history, and had already gone through all their checks to verify who I was). They ended up basically asking me "what about this other PC on your account, do you still use that? No? Ok, we can transfer that old license to your current PC then"....that was their "solution"....ignore the £100+ license that I'd bought specifically for this build, and disable an old PC that wasn't being used anymore.
Next bios update, same thing happened, and I didn't fancy sitting through hours of chat with them again, only to find that they still can't/won't re-activate windows (as I don't have any OTHER old PC's that aren't being used. I really don't understand why they can't just look at the hardware that the license was activated on (e.g., 12700k, z690 MSI, etc....verify you are the owner of the license, then just de-activate the license and provide a new one in instances like this. The "service" I received from Microsoft has ensure that I'll never buy a license direct again.
My own fix for the last time this happened was to just buy a new license for about 3 quid on another website.....even if this eventually gets de-activated, it'll be cheaper to do this 30 times over than to buy direct from Microsoft, and at least it actually works.
Having said all this, it would seem that this is not an issue that "MSI need to fix", as it's not a problem exclusive to MSI boards. If you search online, you'll find cases like this from all motherboard manufacturers. The fact that disabling the tpm before updating the bios could prevent the error (this info was too late for me) suggests that this is just a symptom of modern security doing it's job....so not even a fault as such, just extremely annoying for the consumer.
If you ask me, if anyone needs to "fix" anything.....it's Microsoft. It's their software that is having the activation issue, and they are the ones providing the licenses. Unfortunately, they don't seem to care to address the problem.....which is bad for everyone, including them, as they now lose out from people like me who will never buy another license from them again. If they can't prevent the issue from occurring, then they should seriously consider changing how these cases are dealt with. In my case, they could clearly see that I'd purchased the license, so it should have been no issue at all for them to either re-activate windows, or deactivate that license completely and supply a new one.
Only other thing I'd add, is on the point of "you should use the product key provided with the license"....I bought my license direct from the Microsoft website. They never sent me any code or key. At all. It is all handled directly in windows. You go through the windows settings to buy the license, it re-directs you to the website and upon completing payment, takes you back to the windows settings where you can see that it's now activated. Only email I ever received was an order receipt. I've never been given and literal code. So while this advice might work for a license bought in a physical store, where you get a code on a piece of card in a box, it will not work for anyone that's paid directly in windows.
