Troubleshooting the “Licensing Stopped” Error
My primary laptop computer committed Seppuku this week. After it threw up various mysterious and random errors when launching applications, shutting down, or starting up, I took it to the Apple Store. Fortunately, it was covered under AppleCare, and the replacement of its logic board and RAM solved the problem, returning me to some level of sanity.
After the computer was returned, I had to do some minor maintenance to bring it back to speed. Then I tried to launch InDesign CS4. Imagine my surprise to see this mysterious error message appear on my screen:
The first lesson when you see strange error messages is not to panic. These days, a Google search can often quickly bring good results, but in Adobe Creative Suite 4 products, you can do this using the revised Help system. In InDesign CS4, choose Help > InDesign Help. The default setting is to display Community Help. This gives you access to a variety of third party sources to find answers to your query, in addition to Adobe Help resources. Results include postings here on InDesignSecrets.com! (If you simply want InDesign Online Help, you can choose that, and you can also use the Set Help Preference option to choose what the default Help result will display.)
In the case of my error, Community Help definitely brought positive results:
The second result was an up-to-date entry from www.creativetechs.com which directly dealt with this issue:
We’ve seen sporadic cases of Photoshop, InDesign, or Acrobat that stop working at various design firms, with the dialog box show above…. If this happens to your, make note of the error code, and take a look at this handy, exhaustive entry in Adobe’s Knowledge Base: Adobe: “Licensing for this product has stopped working”
Adobe’s very lengthy technote about this problem lists several possible error codes, and provides different solutions for each. When an error code contains a colon (like mine), refer to the first half of the error number as the error code. A common solution is to download a patch to the Adobe licensing system. In my case, this solved the problem.
I get this issue quite often and I have now tracked it to multiple users on my Mac. I have seperate business and personal logins on my laptop. When I’ve been working in the business login and I switch to the personal one and launch InDesign or Photoshop I frequently get the above error, even if I’ve quit the application in the other login. A restart usually clears the issue. It’s inconvenient but not disasterous. I did log an error with Adobe and was directed to the technote above. I’m thinking the low system resource is probably my problem.
Possibly the number one reason to switch to volume licensing if you can do it. (I think you need something like 10 licenses minimum though?)
I’ve have a similar problem with Illustrator and every time it occurred, I dutifully sent Adobe the error report. Adobe has not responded. I reloaded Illustrator 3. Forget 4.
IMHO, Adobe is starting to behave like, er, Microsoft. Wrong role model.
Behaving like MS in this case would be a good thing. I’ve never had an activation problem with a Microsoft product.
I used to have this issue in 10.5.6 when I would open a CS4 app in one user account, use Fast User Switching to hop to another account, and open the same or different CS4 app. [Yes, this is a total edge case -- I record my videocast in a different user account because I like the segregation of data and work environment.]
I rarely had to reboot to fix this problem; closing the app in one user instance and then trying to reopen it in the original would typically work.
I applied the Licensing Service Update, and all seems fine now.
It happens to me all the time when I run two accounts at the same time and at least one Adobe software is running in the other hidden account.
I’m with Bob here: the activation system in MS Windows has *never* caused me any real grief, despite all the hardware tinkering I do — whereas the activation system in various Adobe CS releases have, on numerous occasions, been a real PITA.
There is a related problem with the same fix. It’s one where the system log (viewable with Console in the Applications/Utilities folder) will display this error message for an Adobe process (FNPLicensingService) every 20 seconds or so:
unknown SIGSEGV code 0
I noticed it yesterday and a search found this Apple forum discussion:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8954279
Eventually the discussion drew in this response from Adobe:
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These SIGSEGV signal messages have been determined to be sent from debugging code that was not disabled. Note that all Mac users of CS4 applications, or Acrobat/Reader 9.0 would see these messages in their system.log, so any crashes are merely coincidental. However, if your crashes are related to a problem with the FLEXnet licensing server, this solution may also fix that, as it causes many of it’s files to be refreshed, which could remove corruption.
This issue can be resolved by downloading and running the updated Adobe Licensing Repair Tool:
http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/licensing.html
Note: If you have previously downloaded this utility, your browser cache may contain the previous version. The correct version will mount a disk titled, “LicenseRecovery11.5.0.9″. If the disk image you mount does not mount with that name, clear your browser cache and download from the link again.
Matthew Laun
Adobe Technical Response Team
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I ran the fix and, he was right, those annoying messages went away. They may indicate something harmless, as Adobe says, or they may lead to lockups, as some users were claiming. But it’s feels good to be rid of them.
Those who like to be careful may want to run this licensing repair script just in case.