So I have no way to know if that is true. My engine is indeed just a few months old. The second SDS vendor told me my engine was too new for the database version. With power on, I no longer received that screen but rather got the database error. I tried it with the key off and it gave me a screen to diagnose the communication problem.
I was confident my SDS software was communicating with the engine. I even copied the dbf files into every subfolder of the SDS installation for good measure. Both installed just fine, port set to com 1 and database files in the directory you mentioned. For me, I had the exact same experience with dongles & disks from 2 separate vendors and both tried on 2 different laptops (win 7 and 10).
