FAQ & Troubleshooting
Answers to common questions, and fixes for known issues.
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Common Questions
Why can’t I delete a product? Product Manager deliberately doesn’t offer a delete option – Retire Product is the only lifecycle action, and it just marks the product inactive rather than removing it. Every licence and every signing key ever issued references its product; deleting one outright would orphan that history, breaking your ability to look a licence up, verify what a support ticket is even about, or trust the Audit Log’s account of what happened. Retiring achieves the same practical outcome – the product drops out of everyday use and stops appearing as available for new licences – without destroying the record, and it’s reversible: click Retire Product again on a retired product and it comes straight back.
How do I set this up for several people, with the Audit Log showing who did what? MintEncoder doesn’t have its own login system, and that’s deliberate rather than a gap – every entry in the Audit Log is tagged with whichever Windows account was signed in at the time. So the way to get several people using it with individually attributable actions is simply to have each of them run MintEncoder under their own Windows account – separate machines, separate logins on a shared VM, or a terminal server session per person all work. There’s nothing to configure inside MintEncoder itself for this; the accountability comes from how you deploy it, not a setting you switch on.
If you also want to stop any of those people from casually changing the settings that determine whether the business can keep issuing licences at all – Backup, Auto Backup, Recovery, System, and Key Manager’s signing-key actions – that’s what the Administrator Lock (Settings) is for. It layers one shared password on top of individual Windows-account accountability, protecting exactly the actions that matter most while leaving day-to-day work like minting licences untouched.
Troubleshooting
Common issues with activation, licensing and key management — and how to resolve them.
Symptoms: The licence appears to install successfully. The application restarts. The activation screen appears again.
Cause: The licence failed verification during startup — often an incorrect product prefix used when the licence was generated. If the application expects MKL1 but the licence was generated using MEL1, it will be rejected.
Resolution: Open Product Manager, verify the product prefix matches what the application expects, generate a new licence with the correct prefix, and activate again.
Symptoms: A newly generated licence is marked expired the first time it’s activated.
Cause: An incorrect expiry date, or a clock difference between the issuing and activating machines.
Resolution: Re-check the expiry date before generating, use No Expiry for perpetual licences, and confirm the customer’s system clock is correct.
Symptoms: Licences generated before a key rotation fail to verify after an update.
Cause: The application only trusts the current public key rather than the full historical key set.
Resolution: Export the full historical key list from Key Manager and ensure your verification logic accepts any key in that list.
Symptoms: A licence locked to a customer domain is rejected on that domain.
Cause: Domain values are matched exactly, including subdomain — example.com will not match www.example.com.
Resolution: Confirm the exact domain with the customer, or enable Any Domain if locking isn’t required.
Symptoms: Clicking generate produces no file, or an empty PDF.
Cause: A missing write permission on the output folder, or an interrupted licence record.
Resolution: Choose an output folder you have write access to, then regenerate from Licence Log.
Symptoms: Backup, Auto Backup, Recovery, System, and Key Manager’s signing-key actions are all disabled, and nobody currently at the business knows the administrator password.
Cause: The administrator who set the password has left, or it was simply forgotten. This is expected behaviour, not a fault – it’s exactly what the lock is there to enforce.
Resolution: On the unlock prompt, click “Forgot password?”, request a recovery code, and paste the code emailed to the confirmed Recovery Email address back into MintEncoder to set a new password. If that address is no longer reachable, contact MintEncoder support – the lock can be cleared from the vendor side so a new administrator can set a fresh password.