This Nuance (formerly ScanSoft) PDF Professional 4 package will not properly activate when running under Windows Vista—unless a slight change is made to Vista. The Data Execution Prevention (DEP) security feature in Vista is incompatible with some (or all) of the executables in PDF Converter Professional 4

Fortunately, the Vista system feature can be turned off for selective applications. To turn this feature off for all of the executables in PDF Converter Professional 4, follow the instructions in this tutorial. The technical support at Nuance must surely be running a scam in that their knowledge base makes no mention of this simple workaround to their buggy software when run on Vista. This same bug workaround will also work on some other of Nuance’s newer software when it fails to run properly on Vista.

Furthermore, they charge $9.95 per technical support session via phone or email, except for the first session. It’s quite obvious that this bug may not be noticed right away. So, if a user calls technical support for this problem after the free session, he will surely get screwed by this devious firm. In fact, the call will probably be worthless because other blogs have mentioned that they still had this problem, even after paying Nuance tech support.

Anyway, the PDF Converter Professional 4 now runs most of the part–a big improvement over its previous condition of not working at all.