H&R Block 2021 stuck on activation page?

Hi all,

I'm trying to use H&R Block 2021 Premium on Monterey (12.1) but I can't get past the "Activate and Register You Software" page that comes up. All the links do nothing. The page doesn't look like it renders quite right:

If I right-click on one of the links and select "Inspect Element" I can then go to the Console tab and see many errors. The ones that are concerning are a bunch of "Not allowed to load local resource: file://Applications/H&R%20Block%202021.app/Contents/Resources/..." lines.

It looks like some kind of Monterey security feature is blocking the app from accessing files inside it's own Contents directory? I tried giving the application full disk access, but that didn't make a difference. I even tried running the application as admin and that didn't work either.

Has anyone else seen this kind of error and know how to get around it? The program is essentially useless if I can't get off this starting page.

Thanks

Posted on Apr 17, 2022 1:17 PM

Top-ranking reply

barretto94 Author

Level 1

13 points

Posted on Apr 27, 2022 7:06 AM

I was able to fix this. Since the error was file access permission related, instead of dragging the application to the system Applications directory (i.e., the installation location folder shown in the H&R Block 2021 Installer application), I simply opened up a finder window and dragged the application icon to my home Applications directory, where I have full read/write access for my user. This fixed the file permissions, so that everything loads properly and I'm now able to activate without issue.

I haven't seen any issues like this with out applications I've installed, but this is really the only application that appears to be running a local web server to serve pages into the app. Perhaps there's extra security protection in Monterey that is preventing applications from loading js or css type resources within the system /Applications folder. Just a guess, really.

Anyway, if any one hits a similar issue, hopefully this will help save them some time.

Thanks,

//Robert

View in context

H&R Block 2021 stuck on activation page?

Similar questions