Hello,

Sorry to hear you are having issues.

Try uninstall reboot and reinstall reboot and test and report back please.

AzDude
Stardock Community Assistant

Since Friday, no one is updating the ticket (SSN-35209) that I have open on this. Is there any support person on the forum who can escalate this for me?

Hi, Sean! Thanks for the update. The issue persists. Here are the steps I took:

1. Created a new, local admin user on the primary PC, and tried it in that profile. Interestingly, the code shows up properly there once I put it in and save it, but as before it connects to the secondary computer but fails due to the same error.
2. Performed clean boot, ran the batch file both on primary and secondary computer. Same issue.
3. I have a new laptop I'm setting up, so I tried that as another secondary computer, same issue. It has no extra software on it, just Windows 11.
4. Rebooted primary computer to normal mode and tried. The passcode (and encryption key) are both garbled characters again, and the error is slightly different. It says it was able to connect like before, but that the encryption key setting is incorrect. It doesn't matter what I put in for the encryption key, when I save it and go back in it's also garbled characters just like the behavior of the passcode. This is what I saw originally in earlier troubleshooting.

Any thoughts?

I don't recall the exact day it quit working, unfortunately. Is there no logging that MP does to indicate what might be happening? I guess logging alone might not reveal why the passcode and encryption code keep getting garbled. I've seen some other forum posts where similar issues happened, but there was no resolution other than rebuilding the computer or the issue just going away on its own one day.

It's odd that it persists beyond the MP purge process. I will have to have a look at that batch file and see all the places that it's being purged, and follow up and make sure things are indeed being purged. It's hard to imagine it's working properly, purging everything, and then on a fresh install the same issue arises.

That's one possibility. But if there's some sort of conflict with something that's running in my profile, it's odd that even on a clean boot with nothing but Microsoft and Multiplicity items in startup + services, Multiplicity keeps garbling my encryption key and passcode as soon as I save them. What program or setting has the power to mess up MP that way, consistently, if it is indeed some outside influence?

Interestingly when I first put in the passcode, it's correct, and testing (before saving) says it can connect except that the encryption key (in the Security settings, already garbled) is incorrect. As soon as I click the Save button in MP and the passcode UI closes, MP garbles the passcode, and any testing fails to connect. I can never get a successful test because as soon as I correct the encryption key and save it, MP garbles it immediately. If I re-open it's garbled.

Isn't there any way to troubleshoot this within MP? For example, the passcode and encryption key are saved in the registry.

1. Is there a way to debug what's happening when I click the Save button in MP, and just before I do that?
2. Is there a way to unencrypt the passcode in the registry to see if it's also garbled? 
3. Isn't there logging that can be enabled to track the actions in the app, so a dev can review and see what's going wrong?

I don't mind if I have to install some kind of debug version or whatever.

[EDIT] I did some more troubleshooting. I did a clean boot to my profile, and only let MS and MP services run. I ran Process Monitor to see if the registry keys for the passcode and encryption are actually modified when I click Save in MP, if I'm just using the same values. They aren't. I also checked by looking at the encrypted data in the registry. If I enter the same passcode and save, nothing changes. If I change to a different passcode, the registry data changes. When I change it back to the original passcode, the data shows the same value as before.

So MP, the app, is garbling the passcode and encryption keys and not honoring the values that it stores in the registry. It's not using those values. That seems to me to be an MP issue.

I'm not sure how those two statements are linked.

But regardless, how can we get MP to load and respect the values that it has saved in the registry for both keys?

I'm guessing the issue won't appear in Windows Sandbox, as that's pretty much like using an entirely separate computer.

If there's no additional logging that's available from MP, or no "debug version" I can use that would provide additional troubleshooting, I suppose there's not much more support can do at this point?

The registry keys are encrypted locally to prevent copying over to another computer as the encryption uses a per machine key.

It appears for whatever reason your user account is no longer able to encrypt and decrypt those values correctly.  Given other user accounts on the same machine can, it points to something installed locally that is interfering with it.

What antivirus package are you using?

I also assume the registry keys are not being reset by something else as Multiplicity will only write to those keys when you save changes to the keys.  For them to reset outside of that would point to an outside factor.

So in the end I abandoned trying to fix this issue. In switching over from a local domain (AD) profile to Azure AD I created a new profile, and Multiplicity now works. I wish the app had some sort of logging or that we could have done smarter troubleshooting, but at least it's working now in the new profile.