Downgrade Rights 8.1 Pro to 7

Hello All,
I have been searching for a bit but haven't found exactly what I am after, so I thought I'd ask around and see if anybody can help me out.
We recently brought 10 machines (E550) into our environment (20 more on the way) with 8.1 Pro installed. We have a custom image of Windows 7 Pro we would like to use. The image is generated from a retail copy of Win 7 Pro that has been fully patched and customized with some common line-of-business applications we regularly use. This allows us to generate new machines very quickly without having to deal with heavy amounts of patching and customization and is a real time saver for us.
We are a relatively small organization and don't have a VL account with Microsoft and as such, we've been relying on the OEM keys provided with the machine to activate our copies of Win 7.
Now, with the new machines, we are able to view the embedded SLP key for 8.1 Pro but we cannot activate it against our retail copy of Win 7 Pro like we could with previous OEM keys ('Invalid key' or 'key entered incorrectly' messages). We meet all the requirements set out by MS for downgrade rights but I cannot find any way to make it work, outside of purchasing VL upgrade keys and using those- a huge additional expense for software we already purchased when we bought the equipment.
Has anybody found a workaround to using the embedded key? Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll respond back right away.

Have you looked at this, http://www.microsoft.com/OEM/en/licensing/sblicensing/Pages/downgrade_rights.aspx
I have not actually tried a downgrade but the only thing I can think of is there is a difference between reimage and install. Not sure if that is your problem.
Hoov
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Hi,
As far as I know,we haven't gotten any notifications about this issue.
Regarding downgrade rights,you can refer to the following article:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-4a6d-aed9-f2c1f8f23e14/Downgrade_Rights.pdf
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Hi,
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