SOLVED: Word Could Not Verify Your Office365 Subscription

If you had an Office product (like Visio or Project) installed with a license key and a different Office product licensed by an email address (like most corporate deployments of Office365), your Office may error out with:

“we ran into a problem while trying to install the product key 0x80070005 “

“Word Could Not Verify Your Office 365 Subscription”

“Microsoft Office cannot verify the license for this product. You should repair the Office Program by using Control Panel.”

I spent weeks working on this both by myself and with Microsoft before giving up and wiping a computer 6 months ago.  I just had another identical problem, worked on it for 9 hours over 4 days before calling Microsoft and the Microsoft tech fixed it in about 45 seconds.  She had apparently seen the same problem with a different customer a few months ago and worked with the Windows dev team to solve it.

Thanks Shradha, I LOVE YOU!

The solution is to simply change the permissions on:

Computer\HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-20\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT

to allow the user in question to write to it and then reboot the PC.

In my case, instead of just allowing one user permission, I set it to AUTHENTICATED USERS > FULL CONTROL as you can see:

If this does not work for you, you likely have a different issue, but we can help with these tips:

1. Run the Office 2019 and Office 2016: Use the Activation Troubleshooter (scroll down about 40% down the page)if that does not solve your issue:
2. Uninstall ALL Office products (Visio, Office Pro+, Teams…) and reboot
3. Run the Office Uninstallation Tool (free from Microsoft HERE) to make sure everything is cleared out
4. Download the free version of CCleaner and run it against your registry and files to clear out any dead entries
5. Manually remove:
   1. C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office
   2. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office
   3. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office <XX>
   4. C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Office
6. Open a CMD prompt as an ADMIN and run SFC /SCANNOW
7. Run a Windows Update, being sure to get the updates directly from Microsoft (only an issue if you are on a corporate network)
8. Reboot
9. Install Office

If your Office still will not activate, get some garlic, call an old priest (even if you are an athiest, and yes he must be old) then contact Microsoft Support.  For instructions on how to do that if you are an Office 365 admin skip to 4:45 of THIS video.