I have an educational version of Cubase 7. Some of the trial instruments (PadShop etc) are either coming close or have expired. I have used some of these in my projects, and when I try to open a Cubase session, I get the e-licence control message “This trial will expire in 2 days …”; problem is that I can NOT close this message box, by either clicking the OK button, pressing enter key. I wait for 2 minutes or so, but the application hangs; I was hoping to open my project, remove the trial plugins and replace with something similar from the standard sound library. Any clues? I have installed the latest e-licence control application. Running Mac OS X 10.8.2 
Try to remove (or trash) these Trial plug-ins from the plug-ins list (HDD/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST and VST3 folder). And start Cubase again.
Thank you Martin. You are a life-saver!! 