Yesterday my trial license key for SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) expired, right in the middle of the day!
I was expecting this but ran into a problem with the license key update. Good news was someone posted about the same issue just this Monday and I found it via Google. I didn’t know Google was this fast in indexing content!

If you are also running into this problem this is the link to Shane’s “The SharePoint Farmer’s Almanac” blog where he has a solution: http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/05/29/problems-with-licensing-moss.aspx

Here are the details of my issue with the trial license update.

After entering the new license key for the Enterprise version in the Central Administration and clicking OK the update in progress screen was shown for about 5 minutes (yes 5!). After completion I just got a rather generic error message in the sort of “An error occurred please check the log for details”.

I first checked the Event viewer for more information, found the error but not much was shown:

Not much in here so I checked the log file for more details.
The log file can be found in the 12 hive > LOGS directory (normally C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS)

Here more details were available:

05/30/2007 11:45:31.15             OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B5C)                               0x158C Office Server                             Setup and Upgrade                 7fwn     High    Executing the Trial Conversion Job.       
05/30/2007 11:45:31.20             OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B5C)                               0x158C Windows SharePoint Services   Timer                                     7psa     Critical  The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.LicensingConversionJob (ID e9a304e0-b90e-4787-969c-372f6d27e6e2) threw an exception. More information is included below.  Arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow.  
05/30/2007 11:45:31.20             OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B5C)                               0x158C Windows SharePoint Services   Timer                                     72ae     Unexpected      Exception stack trace:    at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.Licensing.RecordSqmDataPoints(Boolean trialConversion)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.Licensing.ConvertTrialToLicensed()     at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.LicensingConversionJob.Execute(Guid targetInstanceId)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPTimerJobInvoke.Invoke(TimerJobExecuteData& data, Int32& result) 

As the error details did not guide me towards a solution I opened up Google and after 2 clicks found Shane’s post.
So a simple iisreset seems to solve the problem. Would be nice to find the actual problem behind this issue.