Not really. The problem isn't with Streets & Trips per se, it's with a sort-of central database (the Windows Product Activation Database) in the registry that all MS programs access, Windows, Office, all of them. When you uninstall a program, that database is left in tact, and when you install one, it checks the database that's already there, and generates a registration index for the installed programs.
When that database gets corrupted, it causes problems. The Activation Database can become corrupted by a bunch of causes, only a few of them can be blamed on Microsoft directly. The three main causes for the error is the database gets corrupted, either because of an error in writing the registry (or a hard drive I/O error or some other HD data error), the Security Permissions for the User Account are wrong or gets corrupted, or there is a conflict when Streets and Trips (or MapPoint) saves its template files and the default location of the templates for MS Office files. You could have inadvertently saved a file from Office, as a template, to some location other than the default template location, and that's all it takes to corrupt the database.
Normally, one would think that uninstalling the program and then combing through the registry and removing all references to Streets and Trips and MapPoint would do it, but the corrupted keys are under Microsoft Office, and you wouldn't want to remove those unless you really know what you are doing. There are about 5 registry keys under Office (out of more than 100) which need to be removed (nulled out), and that's what that Reset program that MS Tech Support does.
If you're enough of a geek to do it by hand, then you're enough of a geek to already know (or can easily and quickly find out) which ones to remove, as they are well documented in various tech forums and MS KB's. But since it was obvious that you didn't know about the registry keys, that's why I didn't offer up the hand-edited registry solution.
Unless you are comfortable with editing the registry, you can really screw the pooch with the entire system and not even know what you did wrong. That's the "dangerous" level of geekdom.
