Just when Dorico was "kind of working", now e-licenser won´t let Cubase open

Must have a dongle, as Cubase only supports a dongle, not a virtual / software eLicenser.

Depends on the edition of Cubase - Cubase Elements does not require the eLicenser (dongle), it can use the “Soft eLicenser” like Dorico.

oh, ok. Thanks. I use Cubase Pro, it’s dongle only.

Here we go again ,blame it on the antivirus.

Have you tried ? Every computer is unique, with different combinations of interacting software.
It’s up to you to some of the work.

I have the soft eLicenser on Dorico on my laptop and have used it for hundreds and hundreds of hours without issues. I did have to run a repair on it, only once, and that was immediately after a major Windows version upgrade (an upgrade that took hours). On my desktop I have the eLicenser dongle, and have had that for over 15 years, and in all that time never once had any issues that prevented me from using either Cubase or Dorico. I’m sure I did probably thousands of hours of work in total using the eLicenser. In addition to Cubase and Dorico I also have samples by Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL), all of which use the eLicenser dongle for their authorization, and haven’t had any issues there either.

Something has to be different between your system and mine (and 99%+ of other people who use Dorico quite successfully with no issues like yours), because it seems like you can only use the software for half an hour to an hour before it crashes because it can’t read the license file, which is absolutely horrendous and not at all normal for the eLicenser. It can’t possibly be that your hard drive is dying or something because you would have seen other evidence of that. The only other type of issue that would cause a file read failure in most circumstances is blocking of the file read by anti-virus software because it hasn’t finished scanning the file. In this case you can configure the antivirus to exclude scanning the folder that contains the software eLicenser files, which I believe is normally stored under C:\ProgramData\Syncrosoft. Every anti-virus program has configuration for folders to exclude from real-time scanning due to unforeseen interactions with other software that causes problems. I previously had issues several years back where my system would fail to load some samples, which seemed random, and after delving through logs figured out that it was a race condition between the sample player (Kontakt) and my antivirus, and to fix it I had to exclude my sample library folders.

If you don’t want to have to change your anti-virus settings at all, you could move to the eLicenser dongle, which misbehaving anti-virus software should not be able to inhibit the use of in any case.

To be fair, AV software is well known to break all manner of other things. Especially things that use file system (or network) drivers which eLicenser does.

But yeah. Dongles are so Autocad 1994. I personally think it’s better to let some people use the software for free, than cause so much pain to paying customers. Same argument is what abolished the death penalty in civilised countries.