How to change Visual Studio 2012,2013 or 2015 License Key?

Question

I have a Copy of Visual Studio 2012 Pro on my machine with a Serial key that i\'m no longer suppose to use because i have to use another one. My problem is i keep Uninstalli

Answer 1

See my UPDATE at the end, before reading the following answer.

I have windows 8 and another pc with windows 8.1

I had License error saying "Prerelease software. License expired".

The only solution that I found which is inspired by the above solutions (Thanks!) was to run process monitor and see the exact registry keys that are accessed when I start the VS2013 which were:

HKCR\Licenses\E79B3F9C-6543-4897-BBA5-5BFB0A02BB5C

like what are mentioned in the previous posts. However the process monitor said that this registry is access denied.

So I opened regedit and found that registry key and I could not open it. It says I have no permission to see it.

SO I had to change its permission:

1. Right click on the "HKCR\Licenses\E79B3F9C-6543-4897-BBA5-5BFB0A02BB5C" key
2. Permissions
3. Add
4. In "Enter object names to select" I have added my windows user name. Ok.
5. check on Full control
6. Advanced
7. Owner click on "Change"
8. In "Enter object names to select" I have added my windows user name. Ok.
9. Ok. Ok. Ok.

I found that this registry key has several sub keys, however you have to restart regedit to see them.

By seeing which other registry keys are access denied in process monitor , I knew that VS2013 will specifically deal with these subkeys which are ACCESS DENIED also: 06181 0bcad

and these subkeys should be changed their permissions as well like above.

After making these permission changes everything worked well.

The same thing has been done to Microsoft visual studio 2010 because an error in the license as well and the solution worked well.

UPDATE : It turned out that starting visual studio as administrator solved this issue without this registry massage. Seems that this happened to my pc after changing the 'required password to login' removed in the user settings. (I wanted to let the pc start running without any password after restart from a crash or anything else). This made a lot of programs not able to write into some folders like temp folders unless I start the application as admin. Even printing from excel would not work, if excel is not started as admin.