Apr 22 2023 08:27 AM
I had an issue with two of my servers unable to activate. These servers were activated before the April 2022 updates. The update took an hour to finish so i suspected there was a problem. Both are running Server 2022, one is the kms host and the other was activating against it. The KMS host would fail activation online, and the other server would fail activation against the KMS host. I wasn't able to change the product key on either server. After researching the issue more details showed that it was an access denied error. Microsoft support couldn't help me and wanted me to rebuild the server OS.
I used procmon to find more information on the access is denied error. After filtering for the correct process I saw the clipc.dll that was accessed denied. During the April Windows updates the permissions on the dll changed. I corrected the permissions by finding a working copy of the dll and I was able to activate both servers. I also noticed that edgemanager.dll was changed as well and prevented me from using the search bar. Once those dlls were changed correctly problem was resolved. I suspect more permission changes were done on registry entries and other dlls so I will keep monitoring for more access is denied errors. This issue is intermittent and does not happen every time the Windows update occurs for April, therefore only some of your windows clients may have this issue. Hope this helps someone, as I couldn't find any help on this online or with MS support.