miika

Ok, I had some major licensing problems with Apprentice HD as well, but it seems I finally got it working. Here's what I ended up doing (not sure if all parts are relevant or if I just got lucky). My configuration is a Windows 7 64-bit over wifi. Hopefully this will help someone (or me, if I ever need to repeat this).

First of all, to avoid constant crashing with hkey.exe and sesinetd.exe, I changed both their compatibility settings to Windows Vista SP2.

The problem is that the license manager refused to install the SERVER key, and the server code kept changing every now and then. Plugging to a physical network didn't help. The HD licenses themselves installed nicely.

I decided to try and ditch the server stuff and go with local licensing instead following http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1283&Itemid=9 [sidefx.com] … For whatever reason, the license manager could not access the file C:\windows\keys\license.local so I also switched the directory for the license file. Thus I added the following lines to $HFS\houdini\Licensing.opt:

licensingMode = localValidator
localValidatorDir = C:\Users\miika

Finally I got three greens and OK in the License Administrator (I may or may not have reinstalled the licenses at this point). When running Houdini after this, it demands to obtain Apprentice licenses on startup and actually runs (in HD mode) if I do it. However, it wants to do this on every startup, which is quite annoying… This problem was also magically solved by setting the compatibility mode for hmaster.exe to Vista SP2.

Likewise, mplay also failed to start up until I changed its compatibility settings. I guess that should be done for just about evey .exe file then…

So… hopefully these problems will be properly fixed at some point, but this seems to be working at least so far.