Hello,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. I have forwarded your problem/question to Stardock Support Team for their assistance. Please keep an eye on this thread for any updates. We appreciate your feedback and patience.

Thank you,
Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant.

Yes, I would have posted the exact contents of these notifications except that when it happens the only thing I can do is ctrl+alt+del to restart.

• A full reinstall is extremely unlikely to make any difference, since I'm a relatively new user.  I just installed it very recently, and paid for a license shortly after.  I've had this problem right from the start.
  
  
• Swapping the primary and secondary is not making sense for my setup (the secondary laptop in an inconvenience place)
  
  
• Both of these, combined with such a bad result that requires a full reboot for a machine that I'm constantly working with makes is impractical for me to just try random stuff.
  
  
• So maybe there's some suggestions for a way that I can provide some more information that can be used for finding the cause of this problem.  I'd appreciate that since I really cannot afford random experiments in the spirit of "have you tried turning it off and on again".

Good morning,

The TLDR is that it works, but more details:

1. I first disabled the wifi on the secondary (leaving only wired), thinking that maybe the two connections might be causing the problem.  It didn't help: when disconnected, all control (other than Ctrl+Alt+Del) was gone.
   
   
2. I then reconnected, without rebooting the primary.  The screen had the Multiplicity settings on it, and it was showing that the secondary is connected again, but still no control.
   
   
3. When it was in the stuck state again, I flipped the laptop (secondary) to be the primary.  After fiddling with the activation, it looks like things were set -- but [a] the settings window on the primary (desktop) did not show any change, and [b] the laptop could not control the desktop.  (This is probably not worth much, but I just tried it since I moved (physical) stuff around anyway, and I was preparing to reboot + reinstall.)
   
   
4. I then uninstalled Multiplicity on both machines.  I unchecked the "keep settings" checkbox to make it cleaner.
   
   
5. I then re-installed it on both, and noted that at least the encryption key and the secondary password were the same -- so some settings were still saved.
   
   
6. Finally, I connected the two machines again, and looks like it *is* working as it should now!
   
   
7. I did not re-apply the same settings I had, but when I do that, I'll keep track of whether something will make the problem happen again, and will followup.  Note that for saving the settings, I just used screenshots instead of a backup file, in case there was some corruption that got saved with the backup.

OK, so at this point, I'm happy that it's resolved.  [To be clear, I use both machines in two jobs, very actively, so a restart is a long procedure involving multiple components, which means that I'm not someone who thinks about rebooting their machine as much as I think about a burp.]

BUT, the question is whether you should be happy.  You should not....

The thing is that the bug was there, it was real, and since I was the only one that had it live, the chance of figuring out while it was happening is now gone.  IOW, you have a Heisenbug.

In any case, again, I'm happy that it's no longer my problem...

Can I get some reply??  I posted a new thread, and it was killed, I'm trying everything I can but looks like all roads lead back here.

Anyone?

Could this be a firewall issue?

Under security > firewall > allow an app through firewall

you could try to see if multiplicity is allowed through both public and private networks on both machines

Its not terrible to test it.  I just dont want to be working on multiple PCs at the same time (2 is difficult enough).  If you do test it on the other PC and it works fine, then logic would point us to seeing what is unique about the other pairing that does not. 

VPNs do indeed change the landscape for network traffic ('split tunneling' should be familiar to you if you work in the field) but its normally handled automatically.  Eliminating any active VPN connections is just part of the process of elimination. 

The only other thing we might get into at some point is eliminating IPV6 from the adaptor protocol stack

IPV6 support is new for MP4 and I am not saying it's the problem but we have seen some odd things with it of late.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Product Lifecycle Manager