pne | Ah, for the good old days, where users could do whatever they wanted… (Reply)

So I decided that I’ve used pojwI’ often enough (mostly the translator) that I should probably register it, so I did.

A couple of minutes later, I got an email with a username and registration key. Odd, because the program only asked for a “personal registration key” but no username.

Tried out the key: nothing happened. Gmail had split the very long key into two lines, so I tried the first line, then then second, then my username, then pasted both lines of the key together… nothing.

So I started to compose an email to the “technical support” email address given in my order confirmation. I said what I had tried, what version of pojwI’ I was running, and was about to state which operating system version I had… when it dawned on me what the problem might be.

So, close the program, restart as Administrator, enter the key—and bingo! “Thank you for registering pojwI’ for Windows.”

I guess the program tried to write into its binary directory (perhaps even into its own binary?) and that silently failed. Running it as administrator worked. I guess it expected to run on a version where anyone could write anywhere (XP or lower)—not surprising, I suppose, given that the last version came out in 2004.

Ah well. I’m glad it worked now.