I have PL 4 with NIK 4 installed and working on Win 10. Every once in a while, the NIK button in PL4 is greyed out and clicking on it say NIK is not installed. If I try to install NIK, it tells me this version is already installed. The only way to get the NIK button back is to uninstall NIK and reinstall it again. No upgrades to PL4 or NIK4 have been done around these times. I just had to do it again - previously on Oct 9.
Any idea why this keeps happening and if there is an easier way to restore the NIK button?
Check your antivirus/security software, which might be quarantining a needed file. Can’t think of any other reason why this would work and then suddenly not work, unless you have some kind of file system corruption (in which case, open a PowerShell with admin privileges and run sfc /scannow).
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I wonder if this might also suggest a cause:
Thanks for pointing me in a useful direction, Egregius! I am indeed running SupportAssist on a Dell laptop. I’ve pinned down that the Tune Performance task is cleaning up something (probably a registry entry) that causes PL to think Nik is not available. Now to find out what it is :-(.
Well, the Dell Tune Performance registry cleaner is actually doing the right thing and is deleting registry entries for directories that don’t exist.
The problem is that DXO installs NIK with registry entries in “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\Folders” like the following (54 of them for various NIK components):
C:\Program Files\DxO\Nik Collection\appData\Color Efex Pro 4\resource\common\filters\
The problem is that this directory doesn’t exist, so the registry entry gets cleaned out.
The correct registry entry should have been:
C:\ProgramData\DxO\Color Efex Pro 4\resource\common\filters
If DXO had created correct registry entries, they wouldn’t get cleaned out. Once they do get cleaned out, PL thinks that NIK is not installed.
This is for the Win version of Nik 4. I’ll create a support ticket when I get a chance.