Error message "Codec TrialActivation has a serious erro

[roddeyol]

Hi Ken -Actually I am in Wagga -just a couple of hours down the road from you.No I have not done any regedit changes.Are you able to tell me how to do this?It might be the solution.thanks Rod

[Ken Berry]

Perhaps if you contact me by email (see my profile for the address), I can set out the tedious detail there and not bore everyone else.

[roddeyol]

thanks Ken I appreciate it .I will let everyone know if it works.

[buaile]

I just had the same problem. The system crashed and gave me the codec activation error.

I uninstalled it and reinstalled it with no luck.

I then uninstalled it again, rebooted the machine. Did a search on the c: drive for any file with the word ulead in it and deleted files and folders. I rebooted the machine again and tried installing again.

It worked!!! Give it a go.

[roddeyol]

I unistalled it again and deleted all files and folder on drive C that had Ulead in the name.I also deleted from the registry any entries that had videostudio in the name.when I reinstalled video studio I now don't get the trialactivation error but I am back to the whole program disappearing a split second after the main screen appears.this is hopeless -I am asking for my money back.

[The Badge]

I have the same error. However, when I repeatedly install it on my WinXP machine it fails. I have since installed it on a Win98 machine and it runs no problems. The install seems to be different. I am asked different questions when installing on the old machine. Baffling!!!

[dna]

I had the same problem and now I know the solution

First of all, to be safe, uninstall whatever you have installed. You might not be able to uninstall everything though. Don't spend too much time on this.

There is a post somewhere that tells you how to uninstall and what registry keys you should clean up. I will check again if you still have problems and help you find that post.

The problem is you have an old version of windows installer. Go to windows update site and get your Windows installer updated. I think you need 3.1.

I did this and all my problems went away.

Good Luck!

[Ron P.]

Hi,
This is from a previous post by IanM. The entire thread can be found here:

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... r&start=30

Here is IanM's information:

Here is a fix for anyone who has the VS9 capture crash and also has Windows Installer V3.

The problem is that VS9 does not work with Windows Installer V3 (any release), it only works with Windows Installer V2 ( appears to work with all releases but only tested with three).

The fix is to install a copy of Windows Installer V2 - msi.dll in the same directory as vstudio.exe. In my case this was C:\Program Files\UleadSystems\Ulead VideoStudio 9.0. When vstudio.exe runs it calls msi.dll and loads the Windows Installer V2 ( Windows looks for files in a certain order starting with the directory the application is located in, so Windows finds the V2 msi.dll before the V3 msi.dll).

The V2 file of msi.dll I use is Version 2.0.2600.1106 and is 1.98MB. The file can be found by searching on the internet (or your pc). If there is a place to post it on this forum then I will do that. Is there?

What is strange is that msi.dll is a program for installing new software and I was surprised to hear from reading posts on this forum that it was the cause of the problem. Originally I thought that Ulead was trying to overwrite a "Windows file" and that was the problem. When I upgraded from VS8 to VS9 I ran msi.dll in full log mode to see what exactly was going on and was even more surprised to find that VS9 during install does not use Windows Installer. The SmartSound and QuickTime plug-ins do, but the log showed no errors.

When I started VS9 I found I had the "capture crash" ... I also noted that VS9 did not appear to save any of my preferences/option changes and I thought was was why it was crashing... Spent days debugging each file that vstudio.exe called till I got to "M" in the alphabet and guess what I found - vstudio.exe calls and loads msi.dll.... VS9 is very different code from VS8 and a lot of it is hard coded in terms of calling system functions. My guess is that somehow Ulead is using msi.dll to write the preferences/options to the Registry...

The neat thing about this solution is that it allows you to keep the Windows Installer V3 and any other programs that you install on your computer will call the V3 msi.dll not the Ulead V2 msi.dll. If Ulead ever comes out with a patch then all you need to do is delete msi.dll in the VS9 directory.

Hope this helps those who are still struggling with the "capture crash"

Hope that helps...

Ron P.

[ajazzfan]

I just downloaded VS9 about a week ago, and keep getting the Codec Trial activation problem no matter what I do. Tried downloading from another website, tried deactivating my virus and firewall programs, and finally I also tried installing an older version of msi.dll in the same folder--none of these solutions worked! The last fix corrupted the uninstall files somehow, had to delete everything manually.

I'd really like to get this program to work, since I am currently evaluating Movie Factory Disc Creator 4, and would like to do a comparison to see if VS9 is worth the extra money--and whether or not I can get by with just VS9 or if there are features that MF4 has that VS9 does not.

Is Ulead ever going to release a patch for this problem? Seems a bit ridiculous to expect the end user to jump through hoops by downloading old system files, editting the registry, etc. Is there anything else I can try?
Thanks for any help.

John