A Crystal Reports job failed because a free license could not be obtained in the time allocated.

“A Crystal Reports job failed because a free license could not be obtained in the time allocated. More licenses can be purchased direct from Crystal Decisions or through the Crystal Decisions Online Store.”


This error can be due to a number of factors.  If you have deployed your application on a server and get this message, it means you possibly entered the wrong keycode when you registered Crystal Reports .NET 2003.  You can follow these instructions from Business Objects to reset the keycode: http://support.businessobjects.com/library/kbase/articles/c2012716.asp.  You will have to register your CR .NET again when you open a report in Visual Studio.


Something else to check is that all the versions of the referenced components are correct.  In my recent case, I was preparing for a demonstration on my laptop.  I had installed CR 10 before installing Visual Studio 2003.  When I created my demo project in Visual Studio, all of the referenced Crystal Decisions components were 9.1.5000.0 except for CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.  That component was version 10.0.3300.0.  By deleting this incorrect reference, and adding the correct version, the error was resolved.