Sometimes, the software error is a symptom of a hardware failure. If the USB dongle is plugged into a USB 3.0 port but the driver is designed strictly for USB 2.0 (or vice versa, depending on the specific legacy version), the initialization handshake may fail, returning a null device ID.
For older drivers that work but throw null errors on newer OS: hardlock.sys file -null- processing error
Look under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Aladdin\Hardlock or HASP for empty string values. Sometimes, the software error is a symptom of
Partial installation, manual deletion, or registry damage related to the HASP/LDK runtime environment can result in missing configuration data. The driver then receives null pointers when querying system parameters. depending on the specific legacy version)