Continuous Reactivation Request of All Products Including FSX

[Ethanpilot787]

Hello,
I recently upgraded the SSD in my computer to one with a higher capacity. I restored a system image I made of the old SSD so that I would not need to reinstall FSX as well as all my addons. Unfortunately, each time I launch FSX on the new drive, I am asked to activate the game, which I can do successfully. In addition, I am asked to reactivate all my FSDT and FlightBeam Airports. Anyone else ever have this problem?

Thank you in advance,
Ethan.

[virtuali]

You mean you are asked to reactivate at EACH FSX startup ? But are you replying YES to ALL activation requests ? And, do they complete successfully ?

Try to run FSX As Administrator, at least once to confirm all activation.

[Ethanpilot787]

When I run as administrator, neither the airports or the game itself ask me to activate. However, once I go back to running as a normal user, I get all the activation requests. I guess I'll have to set it to run as administrator permanently. I still wonder what's causing the problem, however. I'm thinking about using the FSX installer to repair the game but I'm not sure if that will cause any damage to the addons I have installed. If I did that, I wouldn't know which installer to use (FSX Disk or SP2 installer). I noticed that when I run the SP2 installer, the "Repair FSX SP2" is grayed out while the "Remove FSX SP2" option is available.

Either way, thanks for getting it to work Umberto,
Ethan.

[virtuali]

There's something wrong with permissions on your regular user account, so the activation information can't be stored in the registry permanently.

[Ethanpilot787]

Any idea which permissions I should change? When I run as administrator it never asks me to activate, leading me to believe that the activation info was stored somewhere. I'm the only user on this computer by the way.

[virtuali]

Probably the security settings in the registry itself, REGEDIT has options for this. But it might be complex, because their actual location changes depending if you run any "Compatibility" mode (you shouldn't run any) or not, how your UAC is set, etc.

Way easier to just run FSX As Administrator, if that works for you.

[Ethanpilot787]

Will do. Thanks!

[Ethanpilot787]

I figured it out, but I feel really dumb for not noticing it earlier. By performing a restore from a system image, Windows 8 deactivated itself. Once I reactivated Windows 8, FSX and all my Add-on Manager airports activated permanently (this is without "run as administrator" checked).