Lightroom license fails suddently

[mcarreau]

For the last 6 months I have been using Lightroom 2.5 without problems. Suddently, 3' days ago, when starting Ligthroom, Ligthroom asks now for the license number or use Lightroom in trial mode.


When I go to the screen to enter the license number, I see my license number entered properly but Ligthroom indicates that it is invalid (by showing a big read cross next to it).


I spent 5 hours with the technical support who asked me to try many things like, reinstalling, rebooting, tryging version 2.6, deleting some Ligthroom entries in the registry then reinstalling, etc. The technical support did confirm that my license number is valid; we also tried a different license number they provided and it failed also.


Note that the version 2.5 I have is not an upgrade from a earlier version.


Well, the technical support did not crack this one; may be one of the guru on this forum have an idea of how to fix this problem?


Ideally, I would like to delete where in Windows it remembers my license number such I can do a complete clean reinstall (when de-installing Lightroom, the information about the License number remains stored somewhere.


Now my Ligthroom is now no longer useable and I am completly stuck.


Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi mcarreau, welcome to the forum!

It sounds like tech support have tried all my best ideas.

2.7 would be my next port of call - and I think that the trial still gets resets with each dot release, so that'd give you 3' days to figure it out.

There was an old tech note with the registry entries. http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/4'1/kb4'1346.html

Personally, I'd just reinstall windows. Sometimes it's easier than fighting with issues like this.

Other thoughts, if you still want to keep fighting...

I'd try creating a clean user account, removing everything I can find related to LR (moving to an offline drive) including those registry entries (and any other LR references), and install into that clean user account. It's solved some other weird installation issues, so it might be worth a shot.

 

[mcarreau]

Thanks for the tip; I have now another 3' days to figure out the problem.

I have found were the license number was stored... in file Lightroom 2.' Registration.lrreg (under the All user directory). When removing this file, Ligthroom does not know anymore what my license number is; if I enter the number manually, this file does not get created as lightroom has not been able to valide that license number (one need to understand how Lightroom validate the license number, normally that should be all with the lightroom exe!!! So independent of the environment).

Will keep trying.

Michel

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Michel, if you'd like to contact me by email, and send me the serial number (don't worry, I already have my own!), I'd be quite happy to try entering it into a Windows virtual machine to see whether it's specific to your machine, or whether it's happening everywhere. If we can prove it's happening on all installs, Adobe may be willing to swap it for another number or something.