Thank you for the report Shawn. This is suspect indeed. I am on Windows 10 and just yesterday went through an update, however, my license service was never removed and continues working as expected. This makes me suspect that there might be some program which could be doing this. Do you have any anti-virus software running? Maybe it is Windows Defender? I wonder if whitelisting the service there would help.

I can confirm this. I installed the Windows Anniversary update a couple of days ago and besides other problems that I had I now see that first, my Ephere licensing service is gone from the services list, and second, that all my Max installations are no longer authorized. However, the Ephere service seems to be working somehow because Ornatrix works without complaining. It's even stranger that I don't see the service in Process Explorer.

Another consequence from the Anniversary update I learned about today was that it uninstalls .NET Framework 2.0, which may disable a lot of software.

I don't want to say that the Anniversary update is a total disaster, but it does have a huge impact on the system.

Hmm... I now realize that the missing .NET 2.0 and Ephere service are almost certainly connected, because the service actually uses .NET 2.0. Shawn, can you please try reinstalling .NET 2.0 on your machine?

The license service should be using .NET 3.5, not 2. I suppose .NET 4 supports it out of the box.