Saturday, October 24, 2009

get rid of adobe licensing service after unistalling

Today I gave a look at the nice Adobe Illustrator program and I found it pretty nice, but pretty difficult to use for a newby as I am.
Actually I was pretty curious about the licensing process of this software and here is what I found:
it relays on a Licensing service so called  FLEXnet licensing service ().
So if you uninstall the program (as I did) and you dont want this licensing service to stay (maybe if something goes wrong with uninstaller if you windows machine is a mess like mine) here is the recipe to get rid of it:

1. Kill the process "FNPLicensingService.exe" from the Task Manager
2. Go to Services and stop, then disable "FLEXnet Licensing Service" from starting up
3. Delete the Acrobat startup items
4. Go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Macrovision Shared\FLEXnet Publisher\ and delete the two files "FNPLicensingService.exe" and "fnp_registrations.xml" and instead create 2 folders with the same name/extension. (this stops Adobe from creating these files again when starting applications)
5. Create and Run "fix.reg" which is something like the following :

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"Acrobat Assistant 8.0"=-
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\FLEXnet Licensing Service]
"Start"=dword:00000004


NB this is intended for UNISTALLING the software if something goes wrong, if you have Adobe programs they will not work after this procedure since the NEED (I guess) to contact a licensing service and this is important if you use Acrobat Reader for pdf reading.

As a side note I discovered that there is a HOST file (in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC) also in windows... and it does exactly the same as in linux : it override the DNS when there is a host inside, for example if your DNS fails for some reason you can put a key inside this file for the license service wit h the ip address 
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx activate.adobe.com
PAY attention to not put something like 127.0.0.1 as a ip address otherwise it will not contact the server but your own pc and the process of activation/check will simply be skipped.

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