Recently, on VOCALOID forum VocaloidOtaku, several users in the US complained about being unable to start VOCALOID3 Editor due to the software expiring. What seemed to fix the problem for the time being was to either uninstall galaco or disable automatic daylight saving time adjustment in Windows. There is currently no official statement or fix from Yamaha, although signs point to some sort of strange interaction between galaco and DST, possibly in the activation code base.
Shortly after clocks rolled forward on March 10 for daylight saving time in the US, several users of VOCALOID3 Editor living in the US started reporting problems with their installation, stating that the software was claiming it had expired and refused to start. Users from California to New Jersey were affected by this problem, although there were also users in the same states who did not. Proceeding through the activation process seemed successful at first but ultimately didn’t fix the problem. No problem reports seemed to have come from users outside of the US, although countries with big user populations such as Japan, Taiwan and China don’t implement daylight saving time, and most of Europe doesn’t roll forward into daylight saving time until the end of March. Furthermore, it seems that out of the VOCALOID3 sound banks available to the public, only galaco had built-in expiration dates (new serial codes that last through April were sent out to users at the end of January just before current versions expired).
So far, Yamaha has not issued a statement on the matter, although some users put two and two together and discovered several ad-hoc fixes, such as uninstalling galaco or telling Windows to not automatically adjust for DST. From these experiments, it would seem that having both daylight saving time active and galaco installed causes the problem. It’s possible that having galaco installed enables some code path in VOCALOID3 Editor that runs into a bug related to DST, since an update to VOCALOID3 Editor was originally needed to properly support galaco. For example, galaco might cause VOCALOID3 Editor to actually check the date and time to make sure galaco isn’t expired, but somehow this carried over into a general code path. This DST bug could also be caused by the software not knowing about DST or having outdated DST dates (the US had changed DST dates in 2007). If this is still not fixed by the end of the month when Europe goes into DST, seeing its effects in Europe would also provide more information about what’s actually happening. In either case, it’s impossible to tell for sure unless Yamaha or someone familiar with the code-base chimes in, and the two aforementioned fixes can be used in the meantime until Yamaha issues a fix.