Microsoft Office cannot verify the license for this product Office 2010 Windows 10

Apparently this is a known issue with Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016. Unfortunately the support article describing the resolution to the issue isn’t very clear. I spent some time analyzing this issue and here’s what I’ve found.

[UPDATE]

This issue and resolution applies specifically to Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 on Windows 7 and Windows 10. It does not work for any Microsoft Office 365 installations. To resolve licensing/product key issues with Office 365, please see Microsoft’s article on how to reset Office 365 activation.

[issue]

The user opens Microsoft Outlook 2013 or 2016 on Windows 7 or Windows 10 and the program opens but immediately displays the following error: “Microsoft Office cannot verify the license for this product. You should repair the Office program by using Control Panel.”

This error can occur if a user has previously run the program compatibility wizard for a program part of the Microsoft Office package and set the option to run that program in compatibility mode going forward. In my example, the user was recently migrated to Windows 10 and after running into an issue with Microsoft Outlook ran the compatibility wizard, selected Outlook and then selected a different operating system than the current operating system.

[resolution]

1. Close the affected application (Outlook in this case).
2. Open Regedit.
3. Navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
   
   
4. Select any executable part of Microsoft Office and delete those related entries. In the example above C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\OUTLOOK.EXE is the only MS Office executable, so I’ve deleted that item.
5. Start Outlook.

[further explanation]

The reason the Microsoft tech article is confusing is due to the instructions which haven’t been updated in a while. Windows 10 does not display a Compatibility tab on shortcuts to or executable files themselves which are signed by Microsoft and known to be compatible with that operating system. It is, however still possible to “turn on” compatibility mode for those same executables using the compatibility wizard.

Once the wizard has been run, however, there isn’t an easy way to remove or even determine whether an executable has been assigned to run in compatibility mode. Even uninstalling and re-installing MS Office will not fix the issue because the current users profile (registry) has the information that tells windows which executables should be run in compatibility mode. The only way to remove the compatibility mode assignment is via the compatibility tab (which has been removed in windows 10 for may executables) or the registry (as shown above).

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