After installing the Network License Server on Windows 2008 Server, it is sometimes necessary to exclude the NLSERVER.EXE, NLSS.EXE and LICENSEMANAGER.EXE applications from 'Data Execution Prevention' (DEP). If your server has DEP enabled, you may find that attempting to run either of our Network Licensing applications simply fails with an exception. This appears to be due to some issues with the interface to the HASP security key.

To disable DEP for those applications, here is a link to a page that describes the general procedure:

http://www.win2008workstation.com/win2008/disable-data-execution-prevention

DEP is a system-provided feature that attempts to prevent malware from misbehaving on the system, by trying to detect what it thinks is a program that is trying to execute data as code. Unfortunately in some cases the interface to our HASP security device is flagged as trying to do this, with the end result that the program is automatically terminated by Windows without any message about what has happened.

Mostly this issue arises on Windows Server 2008, but it can happen on a few Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems as well.