On January 8th, Microsoft released the KB4480960 and KB4480970 updates for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, which have been causing networking and licensing havok for users and organizations that have installed them.
Ever since the updates came out for the January 2019 Patch Tuesday rollout, numerous threads on Reddit have been created where users complain about their license becoming deactivated or not being able to connect to network shares.
To warn users, Microsoft has added the following information to the bulletins for KB4480960 and KB4480970:
| Symptom | Workaround |
| After installing this update, some users are reporting the KMS Activation error, “Not Genuine”, 0xc004f200 on Windows 7 devices. | We are aware of this incident and are presently investigating it. We will provide an update when available. |
| Local users who are part of the local “Administrators“ group may not be able to remotely access shares on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 machines after installing the January 8th, 2019 security updates. This does not affect domain accounts in the local “Administrators” group. | To work around this issue use either a local account that is not part of the local “Administrators” group or any domain user (including domain administrators).
We recommend this workaround until a fix is available in a future release. |
KMS Activation error after installing updates
After installing these updates, users are receiving messages on enterprise versions of Windows 7 that show KMS Activation errors, that their licenses are not “Not Genuine”, or the error code 0xc004f200.
A Reddit post states that users can enter the following commands to uninstall KB971033 and reactivate the workstation via KMS.
Cannot connect to network shares or networking issues
To fix this problem,
If the user accessing the W7 happens to be an administrator on the remote system then this should work on the W7 hosting the share (elevated cmd):
| reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\system /v LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f |
After that, you have to do a reboot!
So it only occurs if the user administrator is on the system hosting the share, as long as it is normal user everything OK, so MS here has what is applicable to the administrative shares, now extended to other shares.