Administrator mode ?

[Condutiarii]

Hi !

My product key is valid but Affinity Publisher doesn't seem to be able to write the file, so I started the software in administrator mode and I was able to validate the key... but when I restart the software without administrator mode, it asks me again for my product key.

I also installed the latest version of Affinity Designer and Photo, they are well recognized in administrator mode, but not in normal mode...

I have the impression that there was a problem during the installation of Affinity Publisher... What to do about it?

Thank you.

[Condutiarii]

No one has encountered this problem or knows how to solve it?

[Dan C]

Hi Condutiarii

Apologies for the delayed response, we've been somewhat inundated with tickets since releasing Publisher!

Please navigate to C:\Program Files\Affinity\Affinity Publisher and check if there's a file called 'license.xml'. If so, please delete this file and try running the program again.

Are you logged into a Windows administrator account? 

[Condutiarii]

Greetings Dan,

I am connected with my main account and it is an administrator account, I can't go wrong, it's the only account on my PC running Windows 10.

I don't have a "licenses.xml" file in the specified directory.

It's strange, I don't have this problem with Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. However, I have only updated each of them. And I hadn't had any such anomalies with the beta version.

I installed Affinity Publisher as usual, he asked for the rights to be raised and then the installation went smoothly. I checked the access rights to the directory indicated by the error message and I didn't see anything unusual.

I don't understand what could have happened...

I hope to have a clarification of my problem. That said, by launching Affinity Publisher in Admin mode, it goes well, it's not blocking, it's just annoying. And I'd like to find out what the problem is.

Thank you for your intervention, that's very kind of you!

Edit : I uninstalled and then installed again without success.

[Condutiarii]

The problem I reported probably does not come from Affinity Publisher but may be due to the configuration of my machine.

I have another application that should work without admin mode and has the same problem.

[Granddaddy]

Try installing the software and running it for the first time using the Windows 10 built-in administrator account, not another account that has administrator privileges. That cured problems I have had only twice during the past 20 or so years when software would not install and run properly at first.

For example, I could not get Photoshop Elements Organizer working in PE 11 several years ago under Windows 7. The program seemed to install correctly, but catalog conversion would not run properly. Even though my personal account was an administrator account, and even when I additionally chose Run as Administrator from the right-click menu on the installer program and on the installed program, the program would not run correctly after what at first seemed a successful installation. So I switched to the built-in Administrator account, installed from there, ran the program once and all was well. I then returned to my personal account and all was well there also. 

I concluded that having an administrator account and/or running a program as an administrator still does not give the program the same privileges as are available to it in the built-in administrator account in Windows. My problems did not seem to have anything to do with permissions on files or folders. Perhaps they were problems with permissions in the registry. It's all far more complicated than I ever imagined, I hope for good reasons beyond my ken. Sometimes computers and software are like clogged plumbing. You just beat on them in various ways until something breaks loose.

[Condutiarii]

1. I have activated the Administrator account,
2. I logged into this account,
3. I reinstalled the software,
4. I reconnected to the only main account,
5. I have disabled the Administrator account,
6. I launched the software... and unfortunately it doesn't change anything.

Thanks anyway for your invervention Granddaddy

[Granddaddy]

After step 3, after you installed the software using the Windows built-in Administrator account, and before proceeding to step 4, launch Publisher to see if it works under the built-in Administrator account. I would also create and save a document and then exit from Publisher, assuming it will allow you to get that far. Then launch it again. If that works then continue with step 4 and see if you can run Publisher from your personal account that is an administrator account. 

Remember error messages may have nothing to do with the problem at hand. Once an error throws the program into the error traps it may never encounter the actual cause of the error. It may then end up displaying a message that has nothing to do with the error that caused it to enter the error trap. 

I'm basing my suggestion on only three experiences I've had over two or three decades. It has been very rare considering the hundreds of programs I've installed on hundreds of machines (I was once in tech support for a medium-sized organization). Only three times did I have to use the built-in Administrator account to get a program up and running. Once I had it running under the built-in Administrator account I could run the programs from my personal Administrator account. These incidents stick in my mind because before they happened I did not even know that registry keys had their own permissions that could prevent those keys from being updated by accounts not authorized to do so. Some registry keys may get updated during installation and first launch, such as keys containing license information. After that the keys may be read from but never again have to be written to.

You can read the details of my experience with Photoshop Elements 11 Organizer in 2013 (where my username is RedClayFarmer) at

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1162077

I also had to follow this procedure of running an installation and its first launch from the built-in Administrator account when installing The Master Genealogist Ver. 8.08 under Windows 10. That program was orphaned when the developer retired from the project, one of the dangers of using software from small companies. Then again, large companies abandon their software also. As I recall with TMG8, the problem had to do with the registration information not being written to the registry when even when using an administrator account. Only when the built-in Administrator account was used could TMG8 write the necessary information to save the registration information. After that it worked from any user account.

[Condutiarii]

Sorry, even if I hadn't written it down, I had started Affinity Publisher with the Administrator account (between point 3 and 4). He started without any problem. Besides, it seems that he kept the license after the uninstallation since he didn't ask me for an email address or a license number.

When I am under my usual account, Condutiarii, it does not allow me to register the license so I launch it in administrator mode, and there it works. In short, I have the impression that I can't use it except in the administrator mode or the administrator account.

As I said earlier, it is not especially blocking, but it is not its nominal operation. And above all, not knowing where this anomaly comes from frustrates me a little...

Thank you.

 

[Dan C]

Sorry for the delayed response Condutiarii - there are a few things I can suggest here.

Firstly, please make sure your user is a system admin not a user admin. 

Secondly, you can choose for Windows to always launch the application in Administrator mode, if you right click on the shortcut and navigate to the Compatibility tab, here you can select the following option -

This will force the app to always run in Administrator mode, I hope this helps!

[Condutiarii]

Thanks Dan, that's what I do.