However, following the universal “Murphy's law,” Rockwell's phone support had the day off!īefore giving up, I made one last attempt at finding my answer on Rockwell's Knowledgebase. Out of ideas, and a few hours lost to trial and error, I finally reached for the phone and called Rockwell Tech Support. I then uninstalled and reinstalled v20.01 thinking v16 might have overwritten some important newer files, but this also didn't resolve the issue. I tried many different keyword combinations, but none of the results were of any help.įrustrated, I tried upgrading from v16.03 t0 16.04 to see the newer minor rev. would resolve the issue, but it didn't. Having isolated the problem to v16, I headed to Rockwell's Knowledge Base and began searching for a solution. And since my first two steps indicated my FTA was working fine, I next tested creating new RSLogix 5000 files in the other versions I had installed. So the only quick way (I know of) to open any other version and bypass the activation popup was to launch RSLogix 5000 by double clicking on a different version ACD project file.Īs I expected, v20 launched with no issue. In this case that was now version 16, which wouldn't let me past the activation screen. Knowing I had just been working on a v20 application earlier in the week, I found that project file and double clicked it. Unfortunately, using the RSLogix 5000 shortcut will only open RSLogix 5000 in the last version used. I had previously disabled time syncing on some of my VM's, and later found if the time difference between the FTA client and server was more than a few minutes Rockwell applications would not activate (even though the activations would continue to show up in the FTA manager.) But in this case my VM and Host times were in sync. Since the FTA Manager did find my activations, the next thing I checked was the time in my VM's OS. If it hadn't, I would then need to troubleshoot my VM's network. Occasionally this error has appeared in the past, and the first thing I checked was to be sure the FactoryTalk Activation Manger on my virtual machine was finding the activations installed on my “host” system. After the RSLogix 5000 splash screen appeared, I received a notice from RSLogix 5000 saying it couldn't find my FactoryTalk Activation (FTA.) I thought this odd as I knew everything was working just a few days ago… Once booted, I used the shared folders feature to copy the clients files to my virtual desktop and proceeded to open his ACD file.Īnd this is where things started to go wrong.

Boy was I wrong!īecause the client sent me an older v16 file, I fired up my Windows XP VMware virtual machine on which I have several RSLogix 5000 versions installed. It was a slow week, and I honestly didn't expect looking over his files would take more than an hour or so.

Last week a client sent me his RSLogix 5000 v16 file to review.

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