Activation HELP!

I've been looking everywhere and found nothing. Please help! Here is the deal. My buddy has a Dell laptop. He got it and XP MCE was installed on it and he didn't get a restore disk with it (And didn't back up). He DID, however, get a Vista upgrade when it came out. After a year or so he hates it and his computer runs like crap. I had a disk laying around from when I worked at Circuit City that someone left there and it had a bunch of different versions of XP all on a DVD with a nice screen to let you choose which version to install. I brought it over and formatted and installed XP Media Center Edition for him. All good so far. When it booted up, it said I had to activate before I could continue. Well, can't do it over the internet since the network card isn't installed yet so I called for the phone activation. When the automated deal on the phone asked for the long ID, I looked down and it wasn't there. Sooooo, my question is:

1: Is there a way to "reset" the activation (even for a day) so I can in install the network driver
2: Is there a way to install the network driver without loading windows
3: Is there a way to somehow get the ID number to come up so I can call

P.S. It gives me the same Activation message when trying to get into safe mode. I do have a legit KEY that I used from the sticker on the bottom of the laptop so I am doing everything legal as far as I know. Thanks in advance.

Problem is that my Key is for Media Center. I don't want to go "illegal" or anything. I am assuming my MCE key won't work for Pro or that would be the way to go and the only version of MCE that I have is the one on the disk that someone "made"