If you use licensed Adobe products, you might come across an error where starting the product will show you a dialog box saying “Licensing for this product has stopped working” and in the message you will see the Error Code 148:3.

Adobe suggests that you restart your computer to fix this issue, however, numerous restarts lead to no solution. Now this might be a really annoying issue if you do not know what to do. However, the solution for this is pretty simple. In my case, I had disabled certain services on Windows which were essential to the Adobe Licensing system.

In the steps below, I will show you how to get rid of this error and also provide additional resources that might come in handy to you if this solution does now work.

How To Fix Adobe Error Code 148:3

The root cause of this problem is that the FLEXnet Licensing Service has been disabled, enabling this service should get rid of the Error Code 148:3. Here is how you can enable the FLEXnet Licensing Service on Windows XP, Windows 7 or Windows Vista.

If you are looking for a software to manage services in Windows you can try out the Services Editor or Service Manager Plus.

Step 1: Press Start > Run and type in services.mscwithout the quotes and hit the Enter key. You can also use the Windows Key + R hotkey to launch the run box.

Step 2: In the services window, find the service “FLEXnet Licensing Service”. If the Startup Type is set to Manual, you just have to start the service and try opening the Adobe application again, you don’t need to follow the rest of the steps. However, you might want to change the Startup Type to “Automatic” so that you don’t have to do this every time. You can follow the rest of the steps if you want to change it to automatically start with Windows.

If the service Startup Type is “Disabled” you will have to enable it, to do that double-click on the service name to open the properties box.

Step 3: In the available Startup Type dropdown options select “Automatic” and click on the “Apply” button.

Step 4: Once the changes have been Applied, click on the “Start” button to start the service.

Once you are done, click on Ok and close the services manager. Try restarting the Adobe application and the licensing problem should no longer be an issue. If this trick does not work for you, you can read more options at the Adobe Knowledge Base here.