BTW, but what exactly does this error mean?
That something in the hardware has changed, and you must confirm the activation.
This doesn't automatically mean you *have* changed your hardware, the real chain works like this:
- Some of your installed drivers has presented itself to Windows as a new device
- Windows reported it to the Esellerate library as a different hardware config
- The Addon Manager (which doesn't even *try* to look at your hardware, it only trusts Esellerate ) notifies you in FSX that Esellerate is telling there's a new hardware and checks the activation again.
Confirming your activation doesn't always indicate you have CONSUMED an activation. It's possible the activation confirmation is requested, but your remaining activations count would still end up being the same.
The manual activation system doesn't work properly for a new activation - as always if there are such problems.
The manual activation always works. What had a few issues last weeks was the automatic online activation instead, because Esellerate had some servers down so, the solution was to use the Manual activation, because that always works.
But the server problems have been fixed by then so, either activation should work now. People are activating every day, both online and offline and I haven't got any unusual number of support request about either method having issues (they were *a lot* in the week the servers were really down).
