Powershadow has ceased to work

Got a surprise this afternoon when I went online and engaged Powershadow for the first time in a couple of days. Clicked on it, hit start and nothing happened. Then a box opened that said my trial period had expired. This is v2.6.

I checked everything and it still showed it to be a registered copy, same one I installed way back when I found it. Everything checked out, but tried twice more to open it and same box telling me the trial period had expired.

Uninstalled and reinstalled my copy with the serial #, but no luck, same warning and it isn't functioning. It was nice while it lasted.

 

That is very strange. I had an strange incident a few weeks ago when my v2.82 somehow became unregistered one day. I simply restored an image of my MBR which solved the problem. I do have one system that still runs 2.6, i'll definitely have to check it out.

 

Hmmm, I wonder what is going on. Do either of you have Returnil installed? I think you do farmerlee, right? I wonder if this has anything to do with the Returnil unregistering itself? I'm currently in PS mode version 2.82 and when it tried to call out as it normally does after 30 minutes of running, my computer hung. I block this connection as it happens with my firewall. Now I'm wondering if when I reboot if PS will ever work again. I know about the MBR enteries, but don't want to mess with all that. I wonder what others are experiencing?

Cheers

Edit: I rebooted and PS 2.82 is still working. I guess I may need to look into backing up the MBR. Can Paragon 8 SE do this? And can I just backup to somewhere on my 1 and only HD as my burner isn't working properly? I'm ordering a burner soon so this is a temp fix.

 

No Returnil here. As I said, I uninstalled and reinstalled and ran Ccleaner to get rid of everything left over - not much, and put it back in with the same serial number I've used from day one. Got the same, 'trial expired' box.

I do have Paragon and a backup image saved on another hard drive. Can't do it right now since I'm in the middle of a project and the software I have isn't with that backup. Once I'm finished, I'll give it a try and see what happens.

 

wow ... thats bad.....

 

It,s a weired software from very beginning. I don,t like many of its behaves:
calling home, writing hidden data, auto-activation on clean image restores, etc and now activation deactivating itself. What a ghost shadow!
Once I even thought of it installing some BIOS rootkit!

 

Wondering if and when it calls home that it low=level access your hard drive to disable program.
Wondering if program is so tightly wound into OS that even fire wall might not be picking up outbound calls as the program could be using other legitimate calls to accomplish out bound connection. I mean when in shadow your system belongs to its enviornment...............

 

It's a shadow of it's former self then..........
.....Sorry, couldn't resist that.

 

I agree aigle, but that is behaviour of many softwares you just got to decide if you trust it in the end.

 

Yes i have both RVS and PS installed on my system and they get along fine in my experience. I don't know what the cause of my little PS incident was but since restoring my MBR i haven't had that problem again.

 

U may be right!

 

Thanks Chuck57 for that report. I too will keep an eye on 2.6 but so far it still works as usual and it's on very many FD snapshots. I long been under the impression that the old 2.6 version was pretty much a static registered app and everything was done locally. I've uninstalled and reinstalled it a few times just to make sure there were no issues from this end that some were experiencing once with it's driver removal snpshot.sys

So far it keeps trucking along but will definitely take seriously this concern and post if anything changes.

EASTER

 

I don't know what's going on, Easter. I haven't installed any new software, other than a word processor, so can't use that as an excuse for some sort of conflict, and right now can't do a rollback with Paragon Disk Manager to an old setting either. When I'm finished with this writing project, I will and see what happens.

I'd think if 2.6 had suddenly turned into a trial there would have been some kind of warning that it was about to expire, but nothing appeared at all.

 

Hi, folks: still using Blinks suites? Check its HIPS or equivalents to see whether anything related to PS has been blocked ?

 

That's a distinct possibility of course and also if the call home on your PC happened to make it to central base and they determined & configured PS 2.6 to terminate all operations back at the originating IP addy. It happens with beta software all the time.

On the other hand it also could be that a date termination was hard coded also. All this is speculation on my part ATM, but i'll check & recheck again and see if any of my installs of it show the same as you experienced.

I'm particularly interested in knowing how this happened and if it's indeed marked for closure at some date in time.

 

Yep, still have Blink Personal here and have had it for quite a few months too. Blink and PS never had a problem in all that time. Blink shows blocking nothing from PS.

This is a powershadow colored message box that popped up telling me my trial has expired, and wouldn't let powershadow start, and that's the puzzle. What trial?