'Microsoft SQL Server management studio' and 'SQL Server Profiler' report 'Evaluation period has expired' message even after upgrading to a licensed edition

Source: Microsoft Support

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After doing an in-place edition upgrade (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707783.aspx) of a SQL Server 2008 evaluation edition to any licensed edition, the SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Profiler tools that might have been optionally installed locally on the system, will still report the following error message after the evaluation period of the original edition had expired.

Evaluation period has expired. For information on how to upgrade your evaluation software please go to http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy (http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy)

Note You will also notice this issue on systems where you had originally installed the evaluation edition of the shared tools and later upgrade to a licensed version.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a bug in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

You have the following two options to fix the problem.

Option 1

Apply Service Pack 1 for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 before upgrading the evaluation edition to a licensed edition.

Note If you had already done the edition upgrade before applying Service Pack 1 for SQL server 2008 you will be required to go through all the steps mentioned in Option 2 below to resolve the problem. The service pack will only prevent issues with future edition upgrades.

Option 2

Use the following procedure to fix the issue:

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

322756 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756)  How to back up and restore the registry in Windows

1. Click Start, click Run, type Regedt32, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following key in the Registry Editor:
   
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\ConfigurationState
3. In the right pane of the Registry Editor, select CommonFiles DWord value.
4. On the Edit menu, click Modify.
5. Type 3, and then click OK.
6. Quit Registry Editor.
7. Rerun the edition upgrade (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707783.aspx) procedure to complete the upgrade of all the components to a licensed edition.
8. After the edition upgrade is complete, refer to the following Knowledge Base article to prevent issues with future updates to the instance.
   
   970608 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970608)  Updates to Microsoft SQL server 2008 will fail after an edition upgrade

How to check whether SSMS will expire?

1. Start SQL Server Management Studio.
2. Select [Help] menu and then [About…] submenu from the list.
3. You will run into the problem discussed in the article if the component 'Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio' has (expires in 'x' days) next to it.

References

• Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677622.aspx (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677622.aspx) )
• 955396 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955396)  How to troubleshoot SQL Server 2008 Setup issues
• SQL Server Troubleshooting and Support (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895923.aspx (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895923.aspx) )
• SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=66ab3dbb-bf3e-4f46-9559-ccc6a4f9dc19 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=66ab3dbb-bf3e-4f46-9559-ccc6a4f9dc19) )

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