Quote Originally Posted by gunslinger
Well, I've finally gone out and bought VI, so now I can just use the cd key off of it. It works fine by the way, so apparently the problem actually was a bad cd key on my original game. Thanks to you all for the help.
I think it would be worth it for you to contact Activision about this - an original MTW CD-key would still be needed for playing plain MTW v1.1 online. Because of the popularity of the bargain-basement version of the game, there are more folks playing without VI online than with it. If you settle for just VI (admittedly a much better single-player experience) as the fix for your woes, you'll be limited in your options, IMHO.