As with many complex industrial software environments, working with Siemens PLCSIM Advanced brought some unexpected challenges — particularly around licensing and low-level driver integration. What started as a routine installation quickly turned into hours of diagnostics and frustration.

Fortunately, through persistence (and some surprising discoveries), everything was resolved — and the lessons learned are worth sharing.

Initial Licensing Issue: ALM Wouldn’t Start 

The first problem occurred immediately: Siemens Automation License Manager (ALM) wouldn't function properly. It either failed to start or would crash, which made it impossible to validate the PLCSIM Advanced license. As a result, key features in TIA Portal were inaccessible, and simulation could not proceed.

After some trial and error, I found that the actual licenses were still safe — they were never deleted or corrupted. The issue was ALM itself not running or being blocked, not the license content.

Solution:

• Restarting the Automation License Manager service manually.

• Adding ALM to Windows Defender exclusions.

• Fully reinstalling Automation License Manager.

• Verifying that licenses were still on disk — once ALM was stable, it found and loaded them automatically.

This restored full functionality in ALM and unblocked usage of TIA Portal.

PLCSIM Advanced Refused to Launch 

The next roadblock was more difficult: PLCSIM Advanced simply wouldn’t start. No error message, no logs — just silent failure on launch. Even full reinstallations didn’t help.

After examining Windows Event Viewer and Siemens setup logs, I found the issue: a required system driver failed to install during the setup process.

•  Driver causing the issue: PLCSIMADV_Driver64

This component is essential for virtual networking between the simulated PLC and engineering software. Without it, PLCSIM Advanced will crash immediately on launch.

Attempted Fixes (That Didn’t Work) 

To resolve this, I tried several system-level adjustments:

• Disabling Core Isolation and Memory Integrity in Windows Security.

• Running all installers and tools as Administrator.

• Trying to install the driver manually using:

  • Siemens.Simatic.PlcSim.Advanced.DriverInstaller.exe

  • Windows’ built-in pnputil
    
    

But every method failed with vague or missing error output. The driver simply wouldn’t install.

* What is pnputil?

pnputil is a built-in Windows command-line utility used to manually install, list, or remove driver packages. In cases where an installer fails to register a driver (as with PLCSIM Advanced), pnputil can be used to directly install the necessary .inf driver file — but it must be run with administrator privileges, and the correct driver file path must be provided. It's especially helpful for diagnosing silent driver install failures. 

Surprising Fix: Install from a New User Account 

The breakthrough came unexpectedly: I created a new local Windows user with admin privileges and ran the installer there.

It worked immediately.

The driver installed correctly, PLCSIM Advanced launched without errors, and simulation ran as expected. Even better — after switching back to my original Windows user account, everything continued working.

Once installed properly, PLCSIM Advanced is usable from any user profile.

Reflection

This experience highlighted just how fragile automation software environments can be — especially when combined with modern OS security. Even when the software and licenses are valid, the smallest driver-level failure can break the entire workflow.

I strongly suspect that a recent Windows update (likely related to driver security or core isolation) contributed to the original failure. This would explain why the software had previously worked fine under identical installation steps.

Key takeaways:

• Always verify that Automation License Manager is running and that licenses are accessible.

• Security features like Memory Integrity may interfere with virtualization-related drivers.

• The driver PLCSIMADV_Driver64 is mandatory — if it doesn’t install, PLCSIM won’t launch.

• If you’ve tried everything, installing from a clean user account might just solve the problem.

• Keep Windows Update behavior in mind, especially when working with driver-heavy industrial tools.

While it was frustrating, this deep dive gave me much better insight into the architecture of PLCSIM Advanced and its integration with Windows — a valuable experience for future virtual commissioning setups.