License issue appears on previously stable installation, anyone else?

[SteveCahill]

Anybody suddenly having trouble with a "Your license cannot be confirmed" popup? I have a Win10 Pro machine that's had a single-user stable LabVIEW 2017 SP1 Professional Development System and Application Builder, with a LabVIEW 2017 permanent license, installed on it for a few years. I use it regularly, usually every few days, no problems. Today (Sept. 11th, 2025), when I started LabVIEW from the taskbar icon, I got a "Your license cannot be confirmed" popup that said that, plus "There is no license associated with your NI account" in red text. And a 7-day wrning to loss of use. But my NI account shows the perpetual license just as described. The account at NI that I am logged into that shows the valid permanent license in my Products list has the same username (my user-name) as the account user-name shown in the top right corner of the "you have no licenses" popup. I don't want to try re-activating on my own without some idea of what has gone wrong. Yesterday was patch Tuesday, I wonder if Microsoft broke something that's needed for license checks on startup? Or is something broken on NI's end? If either of those things happened, others will have the same problem. If others have the same (new) problem, that would be good to know.

[softball]

Hi

That is a nasty problem. Fortunately it hasn't hit me, yet.

But this may a good time to warn others to always take image backup's of their complete computer partitions, as relevant.

My preferred tool is Acronis 2021 which you can have for free for some years. Google the details yourself. I have been using it since 2010 or so and have a license which has been updated from time to time to get relevant feature updates. Fair.

Anything can happen. I recently had problems with LabVIEW on Linux. Restoring an older image solved the problem. Windows is not immune to corruption or problematic updates either. Getting back to a solid working state is simply invaluable.

So make an image backup every few month as needed.

Regards

PS : I recently answered a similar license related question, mentioning an old network card power issue. It is unlikely to be the problem. But who knows. Google search it.

[billko]

This is why I consider NI subscription licenses to be a fancy name for ransomware.  You can easily get locked out of your code even if it's not your fault.

[SteveCahill · Accepted solution]

Thanks to everyone who replied. The advice from support at NI got me my license back. Their instructions were to use the National Instruments License Manager (NILM) which is a tool found in the National Instruments folder via the Start menu, named there NI License Manager. Use that tool to do a serial-number-based license activation through the Local Licenses view. Specifically "... NI License Manager, in the local licenses tab and right click the development system of labview, and try to activate the software using the serial number." My fiorst try, where I took all the defaults, did not work. 2nd try, where I selected the top-level 2017 SP1 software, then went through validation as if I was entering a serial number, worked. The serial number field was already populated correctly, I did not need to re-enter. That brought LV2017 SP1 and all the sub-tools back to licensed status. 

I hope that this is useful information for others. I did learn that re-installation does not "use up" a license-installation from the allowance, as long as it is a re-installation on the same identical machine. 

I was hoping that NI would engage on the "why did this happen?" question, but I am no longer on support so that's not an option. If this happens to someone else who is on support, and can get a good answer as to root cause for the issue, it would be great to have that info.

And yes, good advice on Acronis for a full image backup. A normal catastrophe is something that is near certain to happen because if one doesn't happen every once in a while, people get sloppy and then one happens. I used to use Acronis, but I got sloppy because I haven't had a catastrophe lately.