My guess still is a) something is interfering or Fences ist not installed properly (because of a? ).

But it really is to the support to help You with this. 

No nothing else like that installed

Hi Jonas,

I see a good bit of deactivations of your key, are you doing this manually in trying to get it to function properly, or do you not know it is even happening? Why I am asking is that there are some "system cleaner" software, that tends to mess with the activation files

Paul Scroggins
Associate Technical Support Analyst

I got some proposal to run something in dos environment, but I will not try myself since I'm not savvy enough. If you would think this could make it work, anyone who‘s good at this from Stardock support, could run my computer remotely, send me a teams/skype/zoom invite and let’s try.

BR Jonas

Hello again,

I have heard nothing from you guys since a week, what do we do next?

BR Jonas

I understand but my answer is still the same:

" I'm not savvy enough to do that without risking to mess up my computer, so I will not try.

If you would like to run this with me remotely, please contact me through my mail. mxxxxxxxxg@hotmail.com"

Through my account You have access to my email and I ask for your support to send me an invite and do this with my computer remotely.

I will not run commando in DOS as advised as-well, and I will not try what you call the cleanboot, myself - BUT I'm open for your support.

Now looking forward to a resolution to this.

Thanks,

Jonas

So I did a Teams session with Jonas and I didn't get it to work also and I am very surprised. We did a purge, restarted and a new install together (made sure that everything 'stardock' and 'fences' was gone from the drive) and then restarted.

When starting fences we got the config window, but where not able to create a fence, When looking deeper I noticed, that after trying to create a fence, Fences wants to be enabled. THAT simply doesn't work, which is the culprit. Fences simply denies to run.

So I made sure, there is nothing interfering (standard services and apps running on the machine). AND there IS nothing, as this is a really vanilla install of Windows 10. 

Event logs of windows say nothing at all also.

MS was downloaded using official MS tools and the license is legit and connected with my device 

Out of interest I created a fresh vanilla install of the build in question on Hyper-V and installed Fences as first thing. There is a problem with this build You can recreate. Fences.exe /forceinitialsetup did not help. Made a Video. Hope, this helps.

Certainly appreciate all your efforts here, c242.  As you would suspect, however, a variety of false positives can appear using a VM.  That said, I would still like to see why this failed at a later time.

Jonus, we need to be sure you are not performing this on a VM or anything your work might offer as one. We also could not get it to function properly on a VM.

Paul and I both tested this on actual Win10 boxes.  We both removed all traces of Fences (install dir, activation files, reg entries).

Video of mine (it's just like Pauls's):

https://cdn.stardock.us/support/uploads/msedge_2023-04-21_11-05-35sdrohan.mp4

The activation file (License.sig) is stored here:

C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Fences4

If it's missing after you activate it, that's a problem.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Product Lifecycle Manager

I'm pretty ignorant of things computer compared with you guys, but is there a way to compare the decompressed size...the installed size, that is, of the two Windows10 and just the W10 in both those cases?  Might that give some hint as to whether something is missing? That's Doctor thinking, which might mot be at all relevant.