As a final follow up to the fiasco involving Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, I wanted to give a special thank you to Vorhees for supplying the following information:
Solution how to avoid ProtexisLicensing service after patching with 11.11 Patch:
(1) Install PSP 11.00 and normally license the program.
(2) Go to program dir and find PSIKey.dll and backup it somewhere.
(3) Now install Patch 11.11
(4) After patch with PSP 11.11 in program directory remove PsiClient.dll
and replace with backed up PSIKey.dll and rename it into PsiClient.dll
(5) Then go to Administrative Tools -> Services and stop ProtexisLicensing
(or just press Start-> Run -> services.msc and press Enter)
(6) Stop the service and put on Disable.
(7) Go to Start-> Run -> sc delete ProtexisLicensing
and press Enter, now ProtexisLicensing will be removed from services list
(8) Go to SYSTEM32 folder and delete this files:
- PSIService.exe
- PSIKey.dll
After completing the steps as shown above, I can now run Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI without the Protexis Service running.
I wanted to share this information with everyone because those of us who paid for this software should not be forced to run "spyware" in order to run the application we purchased. What Corel is doing is wrong, and it should be fixed. I haven't heard back from them as of yet, but I did get a response from onyourside@pcworld.com. Hopefully, they'll get in touch with Corel and a solution will be available soon.
What a shame software publishers such as Corel make the choice to shove nonsense like Protexis down the throats of those who purchased their software. It seems as if software manufactures feel as if they can do anything they want these days.