Downgrade from Windows 8 Pro with Media Center to Windows 8 Pro?

OK I've gotten myself into a bit of trouble.

I did my second Win 8 upgrade tonight, paying $40 for a 2nd upgrade key. Everything went great and then I remembered I could install Windows Media Center for free until January. I already had a key from my first upgrade and stupid me, figured "since they give these things away maybe I can just reuse this key."

So I entered the key and Windows accepted it and did the upgrade, but of course when the system rebooted I had an activation error since the key was being used elsewhere (my other machine). OK, so I grabbed the key from my Win 8 upgrade receipt but that's no longer valid because it's a Win 8 Pro key and I now have Win 8 Pro With Media Center which is a different edition.

So now I have a machine that isn't activated. I can't figure out how to "roll back" to Windows 8 Pro so that I can use the key from my order receipt.

I tried requesting another free Media Center Key but no joy there, maybe because I used the same email address for both upgrades?

I can't find a place to buy a Media Center Key since MS is giving them away. And obviously I don't want to spend $40 for another upgrade fee.

Is there any way out of this mess? I can live without Media Center...I mostly was installing it because it was free. I'm just not sure how to uninstall it in such a way that it changes the edition of my OS to Windows 8 Pro again.

TIA for advice...my first post here and you folks seem like you know what you're talking about.

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