This is a bit of a personal one. I use the Adobe Creative Suite through my work, and I’ve been having problems with Fireworks asking for a valid serial number in order to use it.
Before anything else, let me say that I know that Fireworks was “retired” shortly after Adobe bought Macromedia, as they couldn’t justify something that would be a slight bit of a competitor to Photoshop (in a very small way), so they just mothballed it. They’ve “replaced” it with XD which is good, but I still haven’t quite figured out yet. For me, I personally prefer Fireworks because I know it – mainly because I started using it way back when I started all of this web stuff.
The problem that a lot of people see is that Fireworks is, or at least was, available through a Windows Creative Cloud package, but sometimes it has a hiccup with it’s licencing because of it’s age and reverts back to the 30 day trial settings. I have spent days trawling sites, and Adobe support, and pretty much none of the fixes there work.
So far I’ve found two things that work to “fix” the problem. The first one that I go to do was to remove everything Adobe and start fresh. When I say “everything” I mean everything. Remove all of the Adobe programs, sign out of Creative cloud, remove that program, remove all of the user data in global and local profiles and then comb the registry removing everything that has “adobe” in it. It’s a big job, and sucks. The worst part as always is that editing the registry is not something that most people should do, so I’m always very careful to point out that if you do one thing wrong in there you can easily crash your PC completely.
The second thing that I’ve found that actually works, so far at least, is a whole lot easier. All you need to do is install Adobe Muse, start that and licence it. For some reason that also fixes the nag screen for Fireworks as well! Even though that’s a program taking up a bit of space on your hard drive, it’s worth it for me to be able to still use the software that I love.