Leopard 10.5.1 with VW 12.5.3 not working with network home directories.

[Will]

Vectorworks 12.5.3 doesn't seem to be working with network home directories served from Leopard Server 10.5.1. Has anyone else experienced this and is it still a problem with VW 2008? We have emailed our UK distributor several times and they have only responded by copying and pasting the advice to solve a different problem from their website into an email and have not responded to my follow up email.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

Will

[Will]

I just realised I didn't describe the problem properly when I started the new post above. This is what happens

1. Launch Vectorworks, it displays the add serial number dialog,

2. You click 'add...'

3. The dialog for entering the serial number opens, you enter the serial number.

4. Click 'ok ( or 'done' I don't have it in front of me)', the serial number is accepted and you are returned back to the add serial number dialog.

5. Then when you click done in this dialog you get a message saying no valid serial numbers have been found.

The problem only seems to occur with users who have network home directories i.e. their home directory is stored on an afp share and accessed over the network. The serial numbers are known to be correct as we keep them in a word file so that if users change dongles or switch machines and need to re-enter them they can copy and paste. We have been doing this for a while before we got Leopard so we know the numbers are correct and the serial number dialog shows the serial number of the attached dongle so we know we are copying and pasting the right one.

The client machines are also running 10.5.1. And it is possible for a user to create edit delete etc a file in ~/Library/Preferences/ and ~/Library/Application Supprt/Vectorworks/. We have no problems with other software.

Maybe their is a bug in apples AFP thats causing this problem or maybe you are using some old deprecated Carbon API to access the preference file?

Is anyone looking into this? Is it still a problem in VW 2008?

Will

[dbg]

I had trouble that acted very like this. I could get VW12.5.3 to run exactly one time after a clean reinstall (deleted everything I could find, reinstalled from CDs then updated to 12.5.3). Second and subsequent attempts to launch behaved as you describe. I memorized the serial number, I had to install so many times.

I believe it was a permissions problem. I had added users to the Library, and the ACL's mere existence seemed to cause the problem. I cleared all the ACLs, using

sudo chmod -R -N /Library

and the next reinstall seemed to work.

Running OS X.5.1 Server.

It may not be possible to solve the permissions problem when using a network volume, I suppose, but thought my experience might offer clues.