Licensing for this product has stopped working – Oh Jeez

16th December, 2008 - Posted by MsD

I’ve been installing software for the past few days. Not as a full-time gig, mind you, but when the spirit moves, and when I have the energy. Making a lot of software changes is tiring in its own way. And when there are installation errors, it’s much worse. I hate that almost-visceral feeling watching and waiting for something to happen.

Back to the story.  I’ve been installing Adobe Master Collection CS4. Sweet. If you think about it, it’s a remarkable feat of engineering to have the bits of that monster install and play happily together. Mine were playing well, with the exception of a few bits.

I was pleased with the process overall, and now I have a chance to install another couple of Gigs of RAM. But that’s OK too, since I like RAM, and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg anymore.

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In fact, I have worked for RAM. I did a couple of projects in return for RAM chips during the late 90′s. If I recall, the price for 64MB chips was higher for each chip than the 2G I bought the other day.

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My problems weren’t as obvious as they seemed at first glance. As has been the case with previous suite versions, each time you open a program for the first time, you get a message to respond to, be that registration, or entering your product key. For example, if you have Acrobat 9 Pro Extended installed prior to installing the Master Suite (and you do, don’t you?) you have to retype the product key.

I was faced with an interesting error, shown in the title.  The message is a bit cryptic, in that it states that licensing has stopped working, when in fact, it didn’t start, but there you go.

The message is accompanied by a notice that you should contact Adobe customer support, your IT person (assuming it isn’t yourself) if you can’t repair by uninstalling and reinstalling.

I came across a comprehensive technote at Adobe support that addressed the problem. It started with a declaration that uninstalling and reinstalling isn’t likely going to help, followed by a squirrely table that offered different troubleshooting paths depending on your error message.

For instance, I had an Error 5 message, meaning the installation didn’t complete successfully. The instruction was to proceed to Solution 1, the first step of which was to proceed to Solution 3. No luck, and I didn’t think to reinstall at this point.

Next followed pages of information about esoteric settings here and there to revise. I didn’t mind. This is the way I often find out about obscure little features in my system.

The Technote is amazingly comprehensive, by the way. After making changes to the licensing service, Flexnet licensing, restarting, resetting permissions, etc. etc. and so forth, I bit the bullet, uninstalled, and reinstalled.

Problem solved. My new RAM, purchased through the folks at MemoryDepot.com should arrive tomorrow. But that’s another story.