Getting Xilinx ISE 14.7 Labtools to work on Windows 8

I recently picked up a Diligent CoolRunner-II™ Starter Board to help with a little project I have in mind to repurpose an old PassMe board I have from the early days of DS Homebrew. Unfortunately when I installed the Xilinx Labtools and tried to obtain a license the Xilinx License Manager (xlcm.exe) decided to crash on me.

After a bit of googling I found out that Xilinx don’t support Windows 8 (what’s that about? It’s really annoying) and although there were several workarounds listed none of them seemed to apply to my installation. I managed to fix it eventually though so I’ve documented the process in case it might be useful to others.

1. Rename <install location>\Xilinx\14.7\LabTools\LabTools\lib\nt64\libportability.dll to libportability.dll.orig
2. Rename <install location>\Xilinx\14.7\LabTools\common\lib\nt64\libportability.dll to libportability.dll.orig
3. Copy <install location>\Xilinx\14.7\LabTools\LabTools\lib\nt64\libportabilityNOSH.dll to <install location>\Xilinx\14.7\LabTools\LabTools\lib\nt64\libportability.dll
4. Copy <install location>\Xilinx\14.7\LabTools\LabTools\lib\nt64\libportabilityNOSH.dll to <install location>\Xilinx\14.7\LabTools\common\lib\nt64\libportability.dll

Hey presto – working Xilinx License Manager. I hope someone else finds this useful.