Disable SBCore on SBS 2003

One of the SBS 2003 servers we were in the process of migrating started shutting down every hour because we had reached the 21 day limit imposed by Microsoft.

To over come this limitation i found the following info from this website

To disable we followed the below:

1. Download the Process Explorer tool from SysInternals – Here
2. Load Process Explorer and look for the SBS Licensing Service – C:\Windows\system32\sbscrexe.exe
3. Select this service and Suspend it – you should find the service greys out
4. Open Regedit and expand the following key – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SBCore
5. Right click this Key and add the Administrators group giving them Full Permission to the key (refresh this and you should see all the key entries now)
6. Select the Start DWORD and change it from 2 to 4 (this sets the Disabled state)
7. Open a File Explorer window and browse to the C:\Windows\system32\sbscrexe.exe file
8. Right click this and load Properties / Security
9. Add the Everyone group and set the Deny permission for Full Access (should then tick the sub permissions)
10. Go back to Process Explorer and now kill the sbscrexe.exe service – this should now be disabled
11. Check the SBCore service via services.msc – it should have a disabled state and now longer be running
12. Job Done.