How do I fix an “Invalid license data. Reinstall is required.” error in Visual C# 2010 Express?

Question

I\'ve tried to install Visual C# 2010 Express edition onto my PC, but whenever I try to run it, I get a error message.

Invalid license data. Reinstall

Answer 1

Analysis: as per the previous correct note by reece (and the original workaround author), I used ProcessMonitor to see what devenv.exe tries to do and fails. Unfortunately, it was attempting to read a number of reg keys which were not under the Licenses node (so it wouldn't have been enough to take ownership of the latter with subinacl). Furthermore, even after taking ownership, the affected keys still yielded "ACCESS DENIED". Doing it as Administrator was equally useless. Plus, Visual Studio didn't fall for any date change nonsense either.

Solution - Don't try this at home :D though: I downloaded pstools and ran psexec -i -s regedit to get System privileges, then I changed permissions on the entire HKCR node to allow Everyone to Read (:P what can I say, viva el comandante).

I want to point out that adding "Everyone" to have read permissions on HKEY_Classes_Root did fix this issue for me.

I am not sure exactly what permission is needed, but this "worked for me" ... YMMV