office xp and a lost key

the pastor who had his files recovered last week is now doing a full reinstall.
he purchased his computer a few years ago from Dell as a refurbished notebook computer and got a software bundle that included office xp at a premium price.
He managed to save everything except the box and the keys for office (on the back of the origional sleeves, which he did not catch) because he did not have to install anything: all preinstalled.
2.5 years later - NOW he realizes no keys.
so, 2 hours on the phone with dell, they conclude he should call micorosft and also give him a key that does not work.
20 minutes on phone Microsoft concludes it's dell's problem as they can't generate keys with out the volume liscening information (true) so we call dell back and they say to talk to microsoft. we escellate the problem to 'supervisor' level and they conclude that they can only give us the origional key as that is the ONLY key that will work with those disks (odd, ok, considering they already gave us another key, AND a key I had worked - AND the key I cracked in the time we're on the phone worked) - so they just wanted to give him a key for ms word, not the office suite - AND just give him 100$ office 2k3 discount coupon (good if your a nonprofit - but who knows if dell honors that during software resale)

so, he is prompted to go home and fax them documentation demonstrating that he purchased office xp from them. I told him to put the disks on the scanner as the origional receipt probably just says 'software bundle' just like dells records.

translation - don't loose your keys.

oh yeah, the key crack took about 6 minutes using 75omhz.
sad when google can get you stuff faster then legemite customer support.