For a customer I prepared an image. This image contained  a 32 bit version of Office 2010. I needed to enter a key for the installation. At that point I did not had access to their  volume licensing. I wanted to complete the image as soon as possible. That is why I entered a MSDN key. I was unaware at that point that this would cause many problems. First of all the deployed image at that point didn’t accept MAK keys. When I entered the MAK key I received an error that the key was incorrect. After an hour of troubleshooting I downloaded the VL version of Office 2010. I clicked on install. After install Office 2010 accepted my key. However it didn’t activate. I had to call Microsoft Activiation Center in order to activate the key. I asked them why automatic activation did not work. They said that I had to contact MSDN Activation Support. I put the two together and knew that this was caused by the MSDN key that somewhere was activated. I looked for an activation key in the registry somewhere. After deleting some keys I could activate. The keys are:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Registration

And if you installed the 32 bit Office 2010:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Registration

Do this before you install Office 2010 VL.