Max Stuck on Launch After Subscription Renewal — Solved via iLok Reinstall

Just wanted to share an issue I ran into recently with Max not launching, in case it helps someone else out there.

I’m running Max 9.0.5 on macOS Sequoia 15.4.1 (Apple Silicon), and things were working totally fine until one day the application just stopped launching. It would open, hang, and never respond. I’d get the beachball, and eventually I had to force-quit. No error message, no crash popup — just a frozen Max.

Weirdly enough, this happened right after my annual Max subscription renewed. I noticed that Max asked to be reauthorised, but I wasn’t able to complete the process due to network access issues. After I closed the app, I couldn’t get it to run again. It would just hang on launch every time after that.

I went through pretty much everything you’d expect. I deleted preferences, removed all third-party externals and packages, tried launching Max from a new user account, reinstalled multiple versions of Max (both older and newer), even reinstalled macOS — all while preserving my files — but nothing worked. It felt like the app was cursed.

Eventually I took a look at the macOS crash logs and noticed that Max was getting stuck during startup on a system-level call related to network sockets. The process was basically sitting idle, waiting on a response that never came. One line stood out:

Launchd throttled processes: com.paceap.eden.licensed

That pointed me to iLok/PACE software — which I hadn’t really thought about, since I wasn’t actively using any iLok licenses. Still, something in Max (or one of its dependencies) clearly was.

So I fully uninstalled iLok and PACE from my system. There’s an uninstaller app if you have it, or you can manually remove the components from /Library/LaunchDaemons, /Library/Application Support, and /Applications. Then I rebooted, reinstalled the latest version of iLok License Manager from the iLok website, rebooted again, and tried launching Max.

And it worked. No more hanging, and I was finally able to reauthorise the app.

So if Max suddenly stops launching for you — especially around the time of a subscription renewal — it might be worth checking your iLok installation. Even if you don’t think you’re using it. Reinstalling it cleanly fixed everything for me.

Hope this helps someone avoid the days of frustration I went through.