System clock standing in the way of progress

Hello all; first time posting here. Great looking forum though…I’ll be hanging around even if you don’t have an easy answer to my problem.

I own a small engineering firm, and we do quite a bit of CAD/CAM work. I recently purchased a new NC tool-path verification/visualization program (to help out an otherwise-good employee who has a nasty habit of missing small code errors that cause big problems), but I’m having problems getting it up and running. The program seems to install on our system correctly, but when I try to launch it, I get the following error message:

Error – unable to check feature ALL.WIN: oxla
The servers clock has been set back

When I contacted the software vendor about this, the rep told me to “try re-installing Windows XP”, but if the problem is what I think it is, that’s not gonna help…at least not short of a full wipe & rebuild. I’m assuming from the error message that the program looks for evidence of system clock tampering, and I can understand the need for this (to combat licensing fraud)…but I’m also assuming that XP must keep a log file of system clock changes somewhere, since there are no files (hidden or otherwise) that I can find on the system which have timestamps ahead of the current date and time. As a test, I installed the program on my wife’s home system (also XP) and it works fine there…albeit slowly due to an older graphics card…and it’s not a matter of the program “phoning home” for a licensing script with each launch, since I first disabled the modem on the home system before trying it there. My question is, where in Windows XP Pro would such a system clock log file reside, and how do I go about clearing/dumping/grabbing-it-by-the-neck-and-strangling-it-until-the-life-slowly-drains-from-its-beady-little-digital-eyes?

We back up regularly but even so, rebuilding this system would mean reinstalling about 220 gig of programs and data…and I’m not computer-savvy enough at this to know whether or not even that would be a guaranteed fix for this issue. Does anyone here have a magic binary bullet for this problem?

 

While I'm not an expert and don't have a magic binary bullet to cure your problem, I do have a question. Is the version ( Home or Pro ) of XP the same on your work computer as your wife's computer at home? If so, it may be nothing more than a registery key that needs to be copied to your work computer to fix the problem. Download Process explorer from System Internals and install it on your work computer. Launch the program that you are having trouble with, wait for the error window to pop up, and when it does, minimize the program. Then start Process Explorer and it will show you every process and registry key associated with the error window. Note all the programs/keys involved, and then try the same on your wife's computer. Check for differences. This has helped me out a lot at work. Hope this helps!

 

Thanks for the reply, Novice. Unfortunately, my wife's home system is running XP home rather than Pro...but that's easily curable with a quick trip to Staples. I'll download System Internals now and get the data from this system (yeah, its Sunday afternoon and I'm here trying to fix it) then upgrade my wife's system this evening and compare the results.

 

I didn't mean that you should upgrade your wife's system if it was different, was only curious. No sense spending money unnecessarily. I was concerned about the different registrey keys between the two systems.

 

No problem...I understood what you meant. I agree that it would be important that both systems be running identical OS's in order to compare registry keys, so I don't mind upgrading her system.