Hi,

Trying out Apprentice, was working fine but hadn't run the app in a week or so, now it gives me the following error:

error installing key. LICENSE Houdini master license commercial…

Why am I getting this error all of a sudden and how do I fix it ?

I clicked on ? , upper right corner of error dialog, and I got nothing but a tiny , red circle with a red \ through it, I think something clearly didn't install right or has been corrupted somehow ?

Thx
lee

Interestingly enough, you need to run this as admin it seems to get past that error. I'd still like to know why this suddenly stopped working, requiring me to do this ?

Thx
lee

Yeah…I don't know why it does that.

I've been using Houdini since last September.

And for myself I seem to get that between 1 week to a month after a new install.

All I do is just a re-install, thankfully the whole process doesn't take too long.

OK thanks for verify, I'd think by now they would have found a solution, but oh well

I can't imagine having to reinstall, nor am I happy about having to run as admin either

thx
lee

Hey there, a year and a half later and this still hasn't been fixed :p Just happened to me today. I tried to run it as administrator and it worked, good thing i found this thread or i would have reinstalled it. They should fix this though.

Still a problem. Fix is easy enough, perhaps just a simple addition to the error message to try running as administrator?

The licence expires after a certain period of time - I'm not sure how long it is.

All you need to do is run the licence administration app as Admin and re-install the licences and it works fine again.

I just hit this problem again on Windows 10, using Houdini Apprentice. It is frustrating, mainly because I always forget what the solution is… So I will write it here so that next time I search, I will find my own answer.

The solution for me was to go to the license file, (C:\Windows\keys\licenses.local), right click the file, select “Properties”, select the “Security” tab, under “Group or user name” select your user, click “Edit”, and select “Full control”.

i am hitting same issues. However the above recommendations did not work.

on windows 10
launching 17.0.416 command prompt says EnvControl: HOUDINI_USER+PREF_DIR missing __HVER__, ignored.

Then a pane comes up - the Houdini License administrator
saying: Error installing key: LICENSE Genereric Houdini-Master-NonCommercial 17.0 1 15-jan-2019 blah blah ….

Thats it. No houdini …

oblongowl
i am hitting same issues. However the above recommendations did not work.

on windows 10
launching 17.0.416 command prompt says EnvControl: HOUDINI_USER+PREF_DIR missing __HVER__, ignored.

Then a pane comes up - the Houdini License administrator
saying: Error installing key: LICENSE Genereric Houdini-Master-NonCommercial 17.0 1 15-jan-2019 blah blah ….

Thats it. No houdini …

Right mouse click on houdini and start as Administator, this should fix the problem.

Had the same issue today, running as admin fixed it as expected.

This should be mentioned in the install FAQ.