The advice from SoftOrbits to uninstall the older version does not address our problem because the act of installing this giveaway removes the earlier version. Ashraf’s comment about only downloading from this site does not help either because we got the problem after trying to install this version from this site.
I am still getting this problem, but have investigated further and I suspect that the problem is with the SoftOrbits activation process and administrator rights. Here’s why.
I have an administrator account that I try to avoid using except for troubleshooting, and I have an everyday account that does not have administrator rights.
I installed this program with my everyday account, but when installing software I am asked for admin rights to install it. At the end of this installation process, when asked if I want to run the program, I get the activation box and get the activation error mentioned by so many people here.
I completely uninstalled and re-installed the program and got the same activation error. As an experiment I changed to my administrator account and ran the installed program (I did not re-install it as admin), and again got the activation box. However, this time the key was accepted without any problem and the program ran as registered.
When I changed back to my everyday account and tried running the program again I still got the activation box and the same error.
In the registry, for my admin account, the license key is shown, whereas for my everyday account the entry is ALREADY_ACTIVATED and changing this does not affect the running of the program in my everyday account – the activation problem persists.
Thus my deduction is that it is an administration rights issue within the SoftOrbits activation process.