Ever wonder how the installer validates the product key?

No? Well I did, because that’s the kind of thing you wonder about in tech support, because sometimes cases come in about “the installer won’t accept the product key”.

I did a little checking with Process Monitor, and I found that the Setup includes a SoftimageConfig.pit file, and that pit file contains the valid product keys. During installation, setup will extract Setup\SoftimageConfig.pit, write it out to the %TEMP% folder, and use it to validate the product key entered in the installer.

During the actual installation, SoftimageConfig.pit will be added the ProductInformation.pit file on the local system.

The pit file contains product information like the product key and the license feature names (read more about the .pit file here and here).

For Softimage there is the regular product key 590E1, as well as all the different Suite product keys.