Publisher fault

[PaulEC]

To be honest I doubt if anyone, other than the Serif developers, knows exactly how Studio Link works. Hopefully someone from Serif will pick up this thread, or it might be better to email them directly.

[lacerto]

There is a good chance that these registry entries are used by the Affinity apps when they try to establish a StudioLink connection to other apps:

Then it is also possible that these registry entries, if they already exist, are not removed when uninstalling an app, or not correctly updated when reinstalling it.

If you do not feel uncomfortable using RegEdit (it is of course potentially a hazardous tool), you could check at least that the Photo Install Path key points to the correct path, and that No Eula, No Registration and No Update Check keys each have value 0. 

[David in Яuislip]

As Lagarto notes above, RegEdit is a potential hazard however you can export the Serif entry without RegEdit. Open a command prompt window, paste in the following line

REG EXPORT HKLM\Software\Serif SerifRegistryStuff.txt

and press enter. This will write the key to a text file which you can find in File explorer, open with a text editor and optionally paste here to try and solve this enigma

This is mine for a std install using default locations

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Serif]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Serif\Affinity]
"Machine ID"="its-a-secret"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Serif\Affinity\Photo]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Serif\Affinity\Photo\1]
"Photo Desktop shortcut"=dword:00000001
"Photo Install Path"="C:\\Program Files\\Affinity\\Photo\\"
"No Update Check"=dword:00000000
"No EULA"=dword:00000000
"No Registration"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Serif\Affinity\Publisher]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Serif\Affinity\Publisher\1]
"Publisher Desktop shortcut"=dword:00000001
"Publisher Customer Beta Desktop shortcut"=dword:00000001
"Publisher Install Path"="C:\\Program Files\\Affinity\\Publisher\\"
"No Update Check"=dword:00000000
"No EULA"=dword:00000000
"No Registration"=dword:00000000

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, ms.fuentecilla said:

Walt: No use is made of such software, so that doesn't really apply. This remains an enigma and really needs a programmer's intervention probably.

I think @walt.farrell was suggesting that you should use that software to see if it fixes your issue. (From what I have read in other topics, it has helped other users with the same issue.)

[walt.farrell]

44 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I think @walt.farrell was suggesting that you should use that software to see if it fixes your issue. (From what I have read in other topics, it has helped other users with the same issue.)

@ms.fuentecilla might have been referring to my comment that her problem is often caused by third-party cleanup applications that remove too much.

But yes, I believe that using the Microsoft utility that is designed to fix the installation problem she has described would be beneficial.