I eventually fixed it without resorting to support. The wake-up call was Philip's reference to disabling the firewall (thanks!). After I did one more uninstall/reinstall, I happened to look at the uninstall log and saw some references to deleting rules from the Windows firewall. Except that I don't use that one. So I disabled my firewall and enabled the Windows one. The recorder popup came up! I replicated those entries to my firewall, enabled it instead of the Windows' one, and the popup disappeared again!! Nothing showed up in the firewall logs. After some tinkering with its rules, the log started working after I enabled 'anti-ARP spoofing' which seems to be what the recorder is using. Still no popup but now it was easy to see and fix. The recorder accessed port 19200 (its default) but that belonged to some non-related license server. I stopped that server and the recorder popup came up complaining about "Failed to determine whether hooking is installed". Since APP_INIT was fine, I traced it to the culprit which was the Silk Launcher Service. It hadn't started during boot because of that license server (they both use the same port 19200 and that server happened to start first, taking hold of it). I started the Launcher manually and for good measure I changed its default ports to the free 19300-19301 (and got that other server running too). The recorder popup came up at last but still gave me a hooking error. In this case, it complained about the registry entry SilkPerf_IniDir160 pointing to the wrong folder, and it was right. For some reason, it was pointing to "C:\ProgramData\Silk\Silk Performer 16.0\" instead of the correct "D:\Program Files (x86)\Silk\Silk Performer 16.0\" (I installed it on D:). A glitch in the installer I suppose. All's well now and the only thing that stopped working (it was before) is the qaphooks.log. It stays empty even though I've set the environment variable QAP_DEBUG_QAPHOOKS to 1 (and even enable_enh_log). It's not important anymore and it might even come back after I reboot since it's a System Variable. Thank you very much for your help Philip.
↧