KB#00672-How the ACTW.EXE program changed for BASIS Windows-based revision 2.0 products

Title:

How the ACTW.EXE program changed for BASIS Windows-based revision 2.0 products

Description:

The actw.exe program used to bring up a window that allowed the user to enter the input/outfiles, sn, and key. With revision 2.0 of Visual PRO/5 and the ODBC Driver, it will now do that same thing if executed with the "-w" command line parameter. 

If it is run without a -w, it will look in the user's registry for product infomation. It looks under 
        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/BASIS/VPRO5/2.0. 
or 
        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/BASIS/ODBC/2.0. 

The general idea is that the registry path will contain the product name (VPRO5 or ODBC in the examples above, NTDS for the NT DataServer, etc.), and the product revision (2.0 for these examples). That registry key will have 4 values of interest: 

INSTALLED: either a 0 or a 1 reflecting whether or not the product is 'active' or installed 

KEY: the product activation key 

LOCATION: the product location 

SERNUM: the product serial number 

When actw.exe is run without the -w, it attempts to read these four values from the registry. If found, it will use the location for the input/output files (vpro5u.exe and vpro5.exe respectively), and activate it with the sn and key. If it doesn't find these values in the registry, it will present the user with a screen to input the values, just as though it was run with the -w. 

Note that the installation program will automatically create a "Activate Visual PRO/5" shortcut with the -w switch.

Last Modified: 02/23/2004 Product: Visual PRO/5 Operating System: Windows

BASIS structures five components of their technology into the BBx Generations.