Weekend Update Re: Activation Issues

Captains- I have spent nearly all of my available time this week huddled with the engineers who produce the FlexNet licensing service. We are still attempting to determine why some customers have problems getting the activation process to work, as this is a well tested industry standard licensing methodology that has a global installation audience of some 200 million installations... Here is what we know right now: 1) This is currentyl affecting about 1/2 of 1% of customers. 2) Customers who see this issue are primarily using a non-US-English version of windows, and/or their initial windows installation was a US-English version that later had a language pack added to the installation. 3) The problem manifests itself in two very distinct ways:

• The user is never asked for an activation key and the sim CTDs when you attempt to run the NGX.
• The user is asked for an activation key over and over and the sim CTDs when you attempt to run the NGX.

4) We currently have their engineers working on this in the UK and in the USA. 5) Until about 11a Friday, we were unable to duplicate the problem. Duplication is a MUST if we are to resolve this. But today we were able to duplicate the problem on multiple test installations. (This happened because of the excellent feedback we have gotten from a few of you via our support portal. THANK YOU!) 6) Unfortunately- it is the weekend- and these folks don't work for PMDG- so we must wait for them to return to work early Monday morning (late Sunday evening US time) at the UK office to continue efforts. I apologize profusely- and please be assured that I have been driving them as hard as is reasonable under the circumstances. The engineering staff have been getting our immediate and continual support, and their managers have spent a significant amount of time listening to the my displeasure on behalf of those of you who are impacted. I started out this message by saying it that this problem only affects a very very small number of users- but if it impacts you- then it is incredibly frustrating- an I "get" this. The moment we have a solution- I will roll it out to you. Thank you for your continued patience.