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Error writing licence file - FAQ solution doesn't work


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I just bought a license for Affinity Designer on Windows 10, and am experiencing the Windows equivalent of the error described here:

I tried following the advice in the thread, as well as the advice in the FAQ:

Although running at administrator gets me past the license problem, Affinity Designer can then only run in administrator mode. Running it normally will bring me back to this license error.

I am not happy running the program permanently in administrator mode, and it definitely shouldn't be necessary. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

affinity_error.png.32103db8bccef3792fba572b9f30af2c.png

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  • Staff

Welcome to the forum Armdy :)

That's strange. The ProgramData folder is normally in the root of c:\ but yours appears to be in AppData for some reason. Do you have a C:\ProgramData folder? It may be hidden.

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Hi,

I found a fix which I think is a bit of a hack. So for some reason Affinity is looking in "C:\Users\Andy\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\ProgramData", and it fails to write the license file.

When I run it in admin mode, it looks in "C:\ProgramData\Affinity\Designer\1.0" and succeeds in writing the license file. But this isn't good enough, because the next time I start it as a normal user it looks for the license file in the wrong place again and refuses to run. I realised that if I manually copy the "license.xml" file written in the ProgramData path over to the AppData path, it will find what it's looking for and work.

So there is still a nasty bug of some kind, but this hack seems to work for now.

Thanks for your help.

 

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14 minutes ago, Armdy said:

@Mark Ingram I hadn't heard of that, but I checked for it in the settings and it is not enabled.

Does the directory exist in the location that we're looking? We ask Windows where ProgramData is, and it looks like it's returning the following:

C:\Users\Andy\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\ProgramData

What about

C:\ProgramData

Is there anything there? It might be hidden.

If you type %PROGRAMDATA% into the address bar in Explorer, where does it take you?

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Quote

C:\Users\Andy\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\ProgramData

This directory existed. It just contained no license file, and the software seemed unable to write to it. According to the folder permissions, my user account has permission to write to that folder.

Quote

C:\ProgramData

This directory exists, and it had an Affinity directory already. It may have only appeared the first time I ran the program in Administrator mode. Not sure.

Quote

If you type %PROGRAMDATA% into the address bar in Explorer, where does it take you?

It takes me to "C:\ProgramData".

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  • Staff

Just looking into this again and wanted to ask which version of Windows are you running? Are you using a Server version at all or on a network? Do you have any folder redirects setup on the machine?

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It's just regular Windows 10 on a home machine with a local hard drive. I haven't set up any folder redirects knowingly, but I do some software development, so I'm sure I have a few extra environment variables and stuff like that. Nothing crazy though.

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  • Staff

Thanks for confirming. I wonder would could be causing this to happen.

Can you just check one more thing for me? If you go to User Accounts > Configure Advanced User Profile Properties. Is your profile set to a Local or Roaming profile?

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  • Staff

Thanks for checking. Not sure what to suggest next to be honest. We've not seen this issue before. It must be some form of redirection by Windows due to permission issues.

If you compare the permissions for both C:\Users\Andy\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\ProgramData & C:\ProgramData\ for all admins/users, are they the same? Does that also apply to the Licence.xml file?

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  • 7 months later...

Figured out a solution.

Go to 

C:\ProgramData\Affinity

Double click the Designer folder. It should give you the Admin prompt.
Cut/Copy the 1.0 Folder and paste it somewhere else temporarily.

return to the C:\ProgramData\Affinity and delete the Designer Folder.

Create a new folder then cut and paste the 1.0 folder into the new Designer folder.


---

The issue arises when the designer license folder starts requiring admin privilege's. This is why Affinity designer will start in admin mode but not when launched normally. The reason why the permissions to the license folder changed is still a mystery to me. Deleting the folder and creating a new one fixes it because the new folder doesnt need admin access to enter it.

Also, the "\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\ProgramData" error message seems to be pointing to the wrong folder... just ignore it follow my steps...lol

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  • 4 months later...

Thanks for the reply.

Before taking your answer, I took the issue to see why it can't write the information in that directory   \ ProgramData \ Affinity. All Affinity programs were uninstalled and the laptop was reset. The first time I tried to see if the director had permission to change. Everything was perfect. There were also directors from Publisher and Photo who stayed there. I had the 90-day trial options. I came to the conclusion that it must be deleted in order to create a new Design director. I couldn't erase it. I used a small free program for forced deletion. I reset and the installation and activation went perfectly.

 

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