SharePoint – The Trial Period for this product has expired error

I had this error message today when trying to create a report center site. After looking through the SharePoint logs I found the following lines:

Feature receiver assembly ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c’, class ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler’, method ‘FeatureActivated’ for feature ’22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416′ threw an exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The trial period for this product has expired.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CmsSecurityUtilities.EnsureEvaluationNotExpired()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler.FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties receiverProperties)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.DoActivationCallout(Boolean fActivate, Boolean fForce) 

Feature Activation: Threw an exception, attempting to roll back.  Feature ‘Publishing’ (ID: ’22a9ef51-737b-4ff2-9346-694633fe4416′).  Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The trial period for this product has expired.     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.CmsSecurityUtilities.EnsureEvaluationNotExpired()     at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingFeatureHandler.FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties receiverProperties)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.DoActivationCallout(Boolean fActivate, Boolean fForce)     at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.Activate(SPSite siteParent, SPWeb webParent, SPFeaturePropertyCollection props, Boolean fForce) 

After some googling around I find the following blog post – http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/02/05/activating-office-sharepoint-server-publishing-infrastructure-access-denied.aspx.

Changing the application pool account worked and the site was created, although I did have a ‘File not Found’ error first because I had forgotten to enable the ‘Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features‘ feature in the top level site collection.

Hope this helps!