Question
I am experiencing issues installing and running the VisualDSP++ tools on my Windows 7 and 8 machine. Some of the errors encountered when running the tools are:
"Invalid license file. The license file may either be damaged, missing or read-only"
or
"Runtime error!"
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Answer
Your installation issues may be due to user privileges on the machine. This is because the VisualDSP++ tools rely somewhat on the user account having full registry access, however, one of the improvements to security in Windows 7 is that registry access is typically locked down to some degree - even for Administrator account users.
It is possible to avoid such problems by explicitly running an application with full administrator privileges through the 'Run as Administrator' option.
If you are having issues installing the tools please ensure that you are logged in as Administrator on that machine and try again. If you still encounter issues installing the tools then try running the setup file (VisualDSP++ x.x.exe or ) using the 'Run as Administrator' option. If you have installed the tools and are experiencing any of the above issues then try running the VisualDSP++ tools using the 'Run as Administrator' option.
To do this right click on either the setup file or the VisualDSP++ Environment icon from your Program Group and select 'Run as Administrator'. Typically this should only be necessary once - to ensure DLLs are registered, so that VisualDSP++ can reference them on future executions. However, if this resolves your issue we would advise permanently enabling this option. This can be done by right clicking on either the setup file or the VisualDSP++ Environment icon from your Program Group and selecting Properties from the drop down menu. Once the Properties Window opens click on the 'Compatibility' tab and check the 'Run this program as an administrator' under the 'Privilege Level' section.
These restrictions are part of Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) security feature. UAC is briefly discussed in the following FAQ:
FAQ: Windows 7 Compatibility in VisualDSP++ Development Tools. For more information on these restrictions or UAC please contact Microsoft directly or search the Microsoft Knowledge-base.