Years ago we decided to use Bluebeam at work over Adobe Acrobat due to cost. It also turns out our civil engineers like it much better than Acrobat. So Bluebeam has worked well for us and we have had no issues. But today I had a user call who was getting this error in Bluebeam that said “The license file could not be found. Please reinstall the software to fix the problem, or see troubleshooting in the help files for more information.”
So I did what the error said and I reinstalled Bluebeam. But that was no help at all. Then I uninstalled, rebooted, then installed back but that still did not help. Then I decided I would run the repair option in the installer. Still no luck.
Things that did not work.
That is when I decided to uninstall the program then purge everything in the registry that said Bluebeam. As I was trying this I found there were 100s of items in the registry about Bluebeam. I have no clue why there was so many but this was not something I wanted to do by hand.
Normally I try to stay away from registry cleaners but I downloaded CCleaner to see if it would help. I ran the CCleaner registry scan and fixed the issues it found. I had to run the tool a few times because It did not seem to pick everything up the first time.
Now just to be sure I purged the leftover folders and files on the C drive inside the Bluebeam folders found here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Bluebeam Software
C:\Program Files\Bluebeam Software
C:\ProgramData\Bluebeam Software
But none of that worked.
The fix!
Long story short it turns out the computer was not running the installer as an administrator like every other computer I installed Bluebeam on. Ones I uninstalled and reinstalled as an administrator Bluebeam started to work fine.
I am not sure why the same install had issues on this computer and no others. Maybe some local setting or the user account permissions was causing this but I am not sure. After 2 hours of fighting this, I had other work backed up and did not want to spend any more time on it for now.
I feel kind of silly I did not notice that earlier but hopefully, this post will save time for someone else!
