Alright so a little over a month ago, I bought a new solid state drive for my desktop. Something went wrong in the process of migrating my data over from my old hard drive, and I was unable to boot from either drive. I ended up doing a clean installation of Windows onto the new drive, then just copying stuff over from the old drive as needed. Frustrating, but workable. The downside to this method was that the disk cloning software had wiped the product key off the old drive (presumably so that it could be re-used in the new one), so I was unable to activate Windows. In order to re-activate, I would have to buy a whole new license.
But, this is the Happy Happy Joy Joy thread, so there's a good ending: I called Microsoft Tech Support today, told them what happened, and they activated my copy for free! 20 minutes on the phone saved me about $100. Plus I had a cool conversation with the tech support guy. He lives in India (of course), but will be vacationing to an area near me in a month or so to do some skiing. We talked about the best ski resorts, and he asked where he could get some authentic Indian food if he gets homesick. Everything turned out better than expected