Well yeah. XP may be happy with that, but Max has a pecadillo for hardware-matched license keys, so when it found the disk's ID had changed, it wanted to re-authorize the license. Perfectly fine, the install was legit and the network was up.. if only it actually RAN the authorization page properly we'd have been done in 30 seconds.
What we found was the usual 80's-style "Authenticating..." popup, which in a sensible world would lead to the Autodesk "OMG! License broken! Re-authorize?.." window. A quick burst of network traffic and all would be well again. Our client could return to designing teapots, or whatever..
We forgot that Microsoft made IE7 more paranoid than the people who camp outside Area 51 of a night. A popup appeared, informing us politely that "Windows Internet Explorer" could not find a file, namely C:\Documents and Settings\
Fine, we thought, click the OK button. And again. and again. Would it go away? Would it hell. At 20 clicks it vanished for all of 5 seconds, but then, like the cat, it came back.
So after killing Max through XP's process tree (the only way out), we took a peek, and found the file wasn't actually there. Logic kicked in, as well as some coffee, and we ran Max again, but at the first error copied the files from the Max9/Webdepot folder into the temp location it was trying to find. Sounded sensible, and indeed IE7 woke up. Man, did it wake up. We lost count at 50 open blank tabs, all with blocked ActiveX errors, and this time killing Max took a large hammer and some cursing in Swedish.
It seems that RTEaseReAuthBeginReg.html really annoys IE7. IE6 was OK with it, but even using the "you must be off your crazy head!" security settings in IE7, it still refused to accept the file, instead prefering to make tabs faster than the UI could repaint.
Anyhoo.. long story short, we took the code in the Webdepot folder apart, and found that it's the specific 'automatic re-submission' code that IE7 won't allow. The other types of authentication (for no license at all, or a deleted file, or even an expired one) are fine. Autodesk, in their "wisdom", coded the license verification DLL to never give up loading the webpage into the popup until it returned status. Never. It'll still be trying when the roaches rule the world.
Solution? Delete the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Autodesk\Software Licenses (which holds references to the authenticated keys). Re-run Max, and this time we get a "license deleted" error - which displays just fine, TYVM, as it loads different files. Re-authenticate (the license number itself is still there as it's in the registry.. killing the .dat files just makes the DLL treat it like a half-finished new install) and we got out of there in time for lunch. Just.
