By Richard Purvis (Rpurvis) (65.211.242.6) on Tuesday, February 04, 2003 - 03:54 pm:

I just recovered from an interesting problem which may or may not help some people.

I run WinXP (don't know if this is relevant). Last night, I launched LightWave and received the message "Hardware Key not found. Contact NewTek. Running in Demo Mode."

I checked the License.key file and found that its file association had been changed from NotePad to the Registry Editor; instead of an icon representing NotePad, my License.key file was showing the RegEdit icon.

I uninstalled LW and reinstalled - same problem. When I double-clicked on the license.key file, I was asked if I wanted to add the contents of the license.key file to the Registry. I clicked "Yes" and was told that only binary files can be added to the Registry.

I was stumped.

What I finally had to do was reassociate the license.key file with notepad (or whichever text editor you use). By right-clicking on the license.key file I was able to instruct WinXP as to which application I wanted this file associated with.

LightWave now works perfectly.

Thought I'd share.

By william greenlee (Billyboy) (12.218.128.69) on Tuesday, February 04, 2003 - 11:49 pm:

Wow....this is intresting.
Yet another chapter in the hardware lock mysterys.
Thanks for posting!

By Matt Clary (Mattclary) (208.255.196.35) on Wednesday, February 05, 2003 - 06:36 am:

Good work Richard! Make sure to e-mail this to Newtek support so they will have the info.