It's fixed! I spoke to a guy called billy from MS tech support (my new best friend) at lunchtime but I wasn't able to get online. He said he would ring me at 5pm. I doubted that he would, but he did and we spent 45 minutes on the phone and it turns out that it was due to the fact I had done a fresh install of Win7 rather than upgrading Vista. I'm sure that Dell advised to do that but I can't find any evidence of that.  Anyway, he ended up putting the windows 7 disc in and doing an install of the original Win7 over the top of the current system. I'm not sure if he did anything else at his end but it asked me for the license key at the end which I entered and it validated ok. Phew. Syd.
Dell support online seems to be failing so thought I'd try the forum.   I have had a message come up saying that "This Copy of Windows is not Genuine". I ran the Microsoft Genuine Advantage Diagnostic Tool as suggested on the MS website and it has come up saying that my license is invalid. My laptop was bought from Dell with Vista installed over a year ago, and I upgraded to Win 7 through Dell as well. What could be the problem?   On the diagnostic tool license tab it came up with the message "Licensing Data--> C:\Windows\system32\slmgr.vbs(1333, 5) Microsoft VBScript runtime error: Permission denied"   Could that be the cause?   I'm more than a little bit annoyed that I'm unable to email Dell support!   Thanks, Syd.
This Copy of Windows is not Genuine