I think I figured it out, not 100% sure though since now I have to wait another 2 hours for my trial mode to time out. I added the same code to set the activation state in my little singleton class residing in my client project from the DesignerHook.java in the designer project as well. Now I don’t get null pointer exceptions in the designer, and I’m not getting them when I launch a client either. Some reason I thought that the client was running inside of the designer and that it’s ClientHook.java file should be running when just the designer is running. I was wrong; but at least I learned a bit more about the architecture. Thanks all for the responses during a holiday weekend.