Hi c242,

I really appreciate your help, I tried your proposal 3 times, but still no success.

I believe it could be the activation key that is activating but not making the program enabled in some strange way, if that could make sense..

Anyhow now I expect the support guys

- to send a new key

- contact me to run my computer remotely for installation in any way they prefer

- or refund of my purchase

Let's see

My guess still is a) something is interfering or b) Fences ist not installed properly (because of a? ).

But it really is to the support to help You with this. 

Do you have something else installed that also introduce its own desktop overlays. For example, there was report that "360 Total security" introduce its own desktop overlay which interfere with Fences. Refer: https://forums.stardock.com/494957/get;3749819. 

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

No nothing else like that installed

Hello,
I have forwarded your problem/question again to Stardock Support Team for their assistance. Please keep an eye on this thread for any updates. We appreciate your feedback and patience.

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Hi Jonas,

I see a good bit of deactivations of your key, are you doing this manually in trying to get it to function properly, or do you not know it is even happening? Why I am asking is that there are some "system cleaner" software, that tends to mess with the activation files

Paul Scroggins
Associate Technical Support Analyst

I am doin nothing like that, so I’m just trying to follow instructions for installing and uninstalling/purge.

BR Jonas

I got some proposal to run something in dos environment, but I will not try myself since I'm not savvy enough. If you would think this could make it work, anyone who‘s good at this from Stardock support, could run my computer remotely, send me a teams/skype/zoom invite and let’s try.

BR Jonas

Hello guys!

Any new ideas for me...? The SW doesn't run for me yet !

Thanks,

Jonas

Hello again,

I have heard nothing from you guys since a week, what do we do next?

BR Jonas

I think it still best for you to do the Cleanboot : As I suggested here: https://forums.stardock.com/518015/get;3884957

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

I understand but my answer is still the same:

" I'm not savvy enough to do that without risking to mess up my computer, so I will not try.

If you would like to run this with me remotely, please contact me through my mail. [email protected]"

Through my account You have access to my email and I ask for your support to send me an invite and do this with my computer remotely.

I will not run commando in DOS as advised as-well, and I will not try what you call the cleanboot, myself - BUT I'm open for your support.

Now looking forward to a resolution to this.

Thanks,

Jonas

I volunteered to help out via Teams the next days. I hope, this is okay with Stardock support. 

So I did a Teams session with Jonas and I didn't get it to work also and I am very surprised. We did a purge, restarted and a new install together (made sure that everything 'stardock' and 'fences' was gone from the drive) and then restarted.

When starting fences we got the config window, but where not able to create a fence, When looking deeper I noticed, that after trying to create a fence, Fences wants to be enabled. THAT simply doesn't work, which is the culprit. Fences simply denies to run.

So I made sure, there is nothing interfering (standard services and apps running on the machine). AND there IS nothing, as this is a really vanilla install of Windows 10. 

Event logs of windows say nothing at all also.

Hello again,

I still believe there is something blocking Fences from working properly. Is the Windows installation image download directly from Microsoft or its Manufacturer image? Lenovo? Sometimes manufacturer image come with some of its own bloatware.

Thank you,

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

MS was downloaded using official MS tools and the license is legit and connected with my device 

...

Thanks for the report back. I forwarded the issue again to Stardock Support Team for their assistance. Please keep an eye on this thread for any updates. We appreciate your feedback and patience.

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant

Out of interest I created a fresh vanilla install of the build in question on Hyper-V and installed Fences as first thing. There is a problem with this build You can recreate. Fences.exe /forceinitialsetup did not help. Made a Video. Hope, this helps.

I have logged this issue with the developers (Internal Reference: FEN177)

Carl, thank you verry much for helping out a fellow user and you work on this!

I'll try to keep everyone posted with updates as I receive them

Paul Scroggins
Associate Technical Support Analyst

Certainly appreciate all your efforts here, c242.  As you would suspect, however, a variety of false positives can appear using a VM.  That said, I would still like to see why this failed at a later time.

Jonus, we need to be sure you are not performing this on a VM or anything your work might offer as one. We also could not get it to function properly on a VM.

Paul and I both tested this on actual Win10 boxes.  We both removed all traces of Fences (install dir, activation files, reg entries).

Video of mine (it's just like Pauls's):

https://cdn.stardock.us/support/uploads/msedge_2023-04-21_11-05-35sdrohan.mp4

The activation file (License.sig) is stored here:

C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Fences4

If it's missing after you activate it, that's a problem.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Product Lifecycle Manager

Of course I made sure that Jonas' machine is NOT a VM when I looked at his machine.

Let me ask a question: That video doesn't look like a Win 10 vanilla install. It was stressed out several times that the problem occurs with vanilla installed Win 10. ALso it looks like there was Fences installed before. That doesn't resemble the problem at all. My guess is, that something is missing with a newly installed win 10 that Fences needs and that was there with naturally updadet builds of win. Some MS Libraries, VC or something?

I'm pretty ignorant of things computer compared with you guys, but is there a way to compare the decompressed size...the installed size, that is, of the two Windows10 and just the W10 in both those cases?  Might that give some hint as to whether something is missing? That's Doctor thinking, which might mot be at all relevant.

Hi Sean,

"Licence.sig" is not in the directory as I can understand!? 

After installation and activation, this is from in alphabetical order the installed files and the mentioned file "License.sig" seems missing but there are something called License SAS, is that the same thing?