We're experiencing a growing problem with our users in several different domains running in to Microsoft Office 2013 x32 'activation' issues.  We use KMS for licensing, which works properly, but some of the machines (~20-30 out of 1000+) sporadically throw the following error:

'Microsoft Office can't find your license for this application.  Microsoft Office will now exit.'

We know it's not an issue with the licenses per se, since they work on and off and we can force KMS activation correctly / talk to the KMS servers.

It appears to be an issue with the Software Protection service not starting properly.  In Event Viewer, we see the following:

'Software protection service failed to start due to the following error- the service did not respond in a timely fashion.

Event 7000'

This is occurring on a variety of machines in a variety of environments, all fully patched with the latest Office updates.  It's inconsistent, and the 'manually restart the Software Protection Service' solution is not viable as it's occurring on many different workstations.  Office repairs have also been unsuccessful.  

Has anyone else come across this? Or have any idea why the Software Protection Service might be sporadically failing?  Maybe an Office update in the last 2-3 months?

Thanks for any info.