I'll repeat it again:
- If you see the activation progress bar that doesn't seem to connect and, after a brief pause, the Esellerate offline activation page comes out, there's only possible explanation for it, and it's something is preventing to connect to the "live" activation servers, which are the QLM ones.
I have to do this for each FSDT scenery every time I run FS9. There seems to be no persistence between sessions for activations.
The Windows XP compatibility can cause exactly that, lack of persistence between sessions, since it redirect to the wrong registry settings. That's why I always said to remove every compatibility option in FS9.EXE, which is not required.