For some reason Office 2010 may obnoxiously fail to activate with error 0x80070190 after installing updates (SP2 maybe?)

It will activate if you run as administrator though. Also, on the Windows 7 machine I was working on, no right-click “Run as administrator” option was available so I had to:

  1. Right Click word icon (or some other office program)
  2. Go to properties
  3. Compatibility tab
  4. Check “Run as administrator”
  5. Fire up office, activate, then go back in and turn off “Run as administrator”

Kudos to this article for the easy solution