I'm officially not supposed to be doing anything, or much of anything so I'll keep this brief. I just skimmed the thread so I'm sure I missed some stuff.
First, main reason for the activation system is that some of the content is legally and/or provider required to be georestricted, and several that gave us permission to use their streams don't want everyone and their donkey tapping into their RTMP or HTTP servers directly.
The A2 system is on "auto" and usually takes less than 24 hours if there is no issue. Occasionally one comes up. Unfortunately that setup is one that Jen can't deal with, I have to dig through it if there is a problem.
I'm taking a guess that this is an A2 that Jalan contacted me about earlier in the week. I had told him that I needed a couple pieces of info so I could find it and fix it. Most likely just a host-detect issue that can be altered here. If Jalan hasn't followed up just fill out the contact form @ amikoalienusa.com and mention you are the A2 guy from the satguys thread, I'll get the info from you and get it fixed up.
Someone mentioned something about factory reset. 3 good reasons why we warn people not to do that. 1. It is a European box, it will normally revert to raw setup and either be in PAL mode or "auto" which can cause problems with some North American TV's. 2. It wipes nearly all the NA stuff out of it...webtv, portal, apps, satellites, FTP, authorization token. 3. Factory reset NEVER fixes anything for us in NA. This is why they all come with instructions to make a backup. Generally anything that can be messed up on the box can be fixed with the backup in the 8 minutes or so it takes to reload it.