Internet Explorer: “The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context”
I recently installed a new Windows 2003 server and right off the bat started doing the Windows Updates. Even with Service Pack 2 installed, this process takes a while. Normally it wouldn’t be a big deal, but after letting the updates run on automatic for a while… Internet Explorer blew up.
During one set of updates, the system installed Internet Explorer 8, nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately when I launched it, to do more updates, all sorts of strange things started happening. One of the error messages I got was when I tried to hit Update.Microsoft.com; the system said “The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context“. That’s a new one on me.
Fortunately, it turns out this issue is easy to fix (albeit a bit time consuming):
- Enter Add/Remove Programs (Start > Settings > Control Panel)
- Find Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8
- Click Uninstall
- Reboot
- Re-Launch Internet Explorer (now back to 6)
- Run Windows Update again
Done. Yea, it isn’t exactly hard to fix: uninstall and re-install. It is slightly annoying that this can’t simply be “repaired”, and silly that it happens in the first place. But what do you expect? It is Microsoft after all.
this does not work for me.. actually i upgraded my pc to sp3 and later found the following error
“The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context”.
I don’t think it is worth to update to SP3 which could cause you a nightmare. Actually I already sufferred it.
I would suggest to remove your IE7 completely with using following command on the START -> RUN
%windir%\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe
OR
%windir%\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe
This will uninstall IE7 and makes it so that you can reinstall it later. And this works for my PC with the same issue.
Hope this helps