Little red X's in boxes in XP on genuine Windows Activation screen

Turned on the XP box this afternoon after a long interval and it said I have 3 days to 'genuine' my copy of XP.
It has also blocked my i-net access which makes me wonder have I a virus.

[The set up is it is running on an iMac under Parallels and only has SP2 as SP3 was not compatible with the version of //'s]
I have i-net access on the mac side

Anyway trying to 'genuine' it by phone and there are a few pesky boxes on the screen with a red X in them and one of them is blocking the some of the numbers I need to key into the phone.

How can I remove them please?
Thanks

Do you have a valid windows xp license with a unique key ?

All I will say on the matter is that google is your friend

jh: yes, 5 or 6 copies. This 'genuine' question came up over the years, never a problem before.

As XP is no longer supported by Microsoft anything goes.

ircoha said:

jh: yes, 5 or 6 copies. This 'genuine' question came up over the years, never a problem before.

Click to expand...

XP was still supported then... Perhaps that is the difference.

Have a laptop which I will fire up off the web now to see what it does.
The red X is some sort of security setting which I cannot remember how to unset.
As to google being my friend, only if one can use the correct wording.

ircoha said:

As to google being my friend, only if one can use the correct wording.

Click to expand...

Absolutely.

You input EXACTLY the message that's popping up - within parentheses - without one single typo. Then READ.

sounds very virusy to me.

See if you can download, install and run a free copy of malwarebytes.
https://www.malwarebytes.org/

Thank JJ, I tend to agree as I don't have web access from the XP side but do from the Mac side.
Am running that now as I had it already installed but couldn't update it. Thanks anyway.
However the red X is some security issue I remember years ago with 3.1 that malicious code was imbedded in these little images.

As to Google, the issue is not 'type-able' as I want to know how to get rid of the red X in the boxes.
English is not my first language so maybe I am not making myself clear:

Amended from my first post:
Anyway trying to 'genuine' it by phone and there are a few pesky boxes on the screen with a red X in them and one of them is blocking some of the numbers I need to key into the phone key pad.

There is no message to key

Just to close this out.
By selecting Ignore fonts and Colours in the accessibility options within the internet explorer options under tools I was able to read the numbers though the little boxes and successfully keyed them in, it is now working.

None of the ideas, workarounds, etc provided in the different windows forums helped.
Thanks for the ideas.

Little red Xs are often placeholders for images that are no longer to be found where the page expects them.