OK so I have to support a few XP and Windows 95/98 users even now in 2021.
One XP machine developed a fault where it would give a few days required to activate, but would then state it was already activated.
The usual oobe 30 day reset worked, but of course is only valid for up to 120 days.
All other suggestions seemed to fail. (Registry permissions, modifying wpa.dbl etc.)
Turns out someone has created a file called ‘antiwpa’ which patches the WPA system in memory to think it’s running in Safe mode. Tested this solution and it seems to work fine. (Discovered by a torrent site.)
You can probably find it by using qBittorrent and the search feature – of course you’re taking your chance that it might do something evil as well as patching winlogon in memory, but if it’s an offline system it probably presents minimal risk.
All the top Google results are locked due to their age – so I doubt anyone will ever find this post, but you never know.