Armdy Posted May 7, 2020 Share Posted May 7, 2020 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! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Leigh Posted May 15, 2020 Staff Share Posted May 15, 2020 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armdy Posted May 18, 2020 Author Share Posted May 18, 2020 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Ingram Posted May 18, 2020 Share Posted May 18, 2020 @Armdy do you have Controlled Folder Access enabled? https://www.windowscentral.com/how-enable-controlled-folder-access-windows-10-fall-creators-update Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armdy Posted May 18, 2020 Author Share Posted May 18, 2020 @Mark Ingram I hadn't heard of that, but I checked for it in the settings and it is not enabled. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Ingram Posted May 18, 2020 Share Posted May 18, 2020 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armdy Posted May 18, 2020 Author Share Posted May 18, 2020 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". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Leigh Posted May 26, 2020 Staff Share Posted May 26, 2020 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armdy Posted May 26, 2020 Author Share Posted May 26, 2020 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Leigh Posted May 27, 2020 Staff Share Posted May 27, 2020 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armdy Posted May 27, 2020 Author Share Posted May 27, 2020 It's set to Local Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Leigh Posted May 28, 2020 Staff Share Posted May 28, 2020 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlazingViper Posted January 1, 2021 Share Posted January 1, 2021 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 Leigh 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Calin Georgescu Posted May 11, 2021 Share Posted May 11, 2021 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. Leigh 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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