Hi all,

Win 10, Studio 2022, 17.03.3.11695 (upgrade to the next CU was not possible due to an ongoing project).

I recently experienced quite a weird situation: I had used our Professional license on my notebook and one of the Freelance Plus licenses on my desktop computer. Now, I wanted to swap both licenses because I needed the Professional license back on my desktop computer.

To do so, I tried deactivation via the usual way, i.e., the Help tab in Trados. After confirming, I got the following message:

(Deactivation failed)

When I clicked OK, the product activation screen redisplayed:

When I clicked OK there, the following message appeared:

(The product license was deactivated and Studio will be closed. To start Studio again, you need to activate the product.)

When I clicked OK, Studio closed, but could be restarted and worked again with the previous license, i.e., the license was still active!

This behavior was reproducible with all our licenses on different computers and on different days.

To be honest, I found this behavior quite erratic. The messages are contradicting themselves, and the deactivation from within Studio does not seem to work at all at the moment.

Next, I tried resetting the licenses in our RWS account.

Deactivation in our account (via the Reset option) did work on the RWS end, i.e., the licenses were displayed as "Available" again in our account. However, I was still able to start the program on both computers after that (even after having waited more than half an hour), so the licenses were still not deactivated on our computers.

I then contacted support, and Sergiu told me a workaround, i.e., to rename the studio.lic file under C:\ProgramData\Trados\Trados Studio\Studio17\Data to perform the deactivation on our computers. This finally worked, but I think this is definitely asking too much from normal users – I know that I'm not the only one with this problem.

Another user just called me and reported similar problems, so I think this is something that needs to be looked into by the Dev team.

Thanks!

Best regards

Annette (from Manfred's account)