WB5 - Got it working

Getting WB5 working: try activation

from Stardock Forums

I had the same problem so many folks were reporting here; WB5 installed but all I could get was the 'classic' skin in XP. I was about to uninstall it but fortunately just before I did I noticed that our network firewall had logged a failed connection to sdcentral.stardock.com/activate/activate.aspx at about the time I installed the beta.

So I fired up Stardock Central and saw that WB5 wasn't activated. I asked it to activate, then set a theme, and all was well.

I have two comments on this. Firstly I clearly remember watching SDC finish off the beta install and say 'activating'; it did not display any error that I could see, even though I know now that the activation failed.

Secondly, if the app isn't activated, at least it could refuse to run or complain when I try to set a theme, rather than just not working and leaving me to work out why! I even checked the event log files and there was nothing to lead me to believe that the app was deliberately not working as appears to be the case ...

So I thought I'd just mention this to others in case they also have an activation problem.

PS I just looked at wb5.log in sdcentral\installed dir and the last four lines are:

Execute:     C:\Program Files\Stardock\Object Desktop\WindowBlinds\wise_post.exe 1
Activation:  0 Failed (0)
Update:      C:\Program Files\Stardock\SDCentral\installed\wb5.xml 1
Result:      Update successful
As can be seen it says 'update successful' even though it knows the activation failed.
windowblinds
4,339 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
~ I tried activating it and still got an error. Please help!
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
00Chris00: It shows that your account for the Windowblinds 5 Beta was activated on our end yesterday at 8:53am (GMT-6).
This was actually a known issue and updating to the latest version should address it.

Nomad529: If you haven't seen already, I've posted a response to the thread you started, "~Unable to activate product."

-Mike
[Stardock Support]

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
This was actually a known issue and updating to the latest version should address it.


for some reason the new beta is not showing up in SDC, but it doesn't worry me much now since once I registered the 490 I downloaded it's been working fine, so I wouldn't be able to test the fix anyhow.

one thing I'd like to point out is that the reason it failed on my end is that the registration program didn't respect the proxy settings given to SDC. that is while SDC was able download the files as it knows the proxy, it appears that this knowledge is not passed on to the (presumably standalone) registration tool. I'd guess that it then attempted to use window's internet settings, which in this scenario led it to hitting our office firewall (I don't use IE so windows proxy settings are not configured).

I'd suggest you pass this on to the dev folks unless this is what they fixed in the new beta.