Booted up our Element console yesterday morning and my show file seemed to be restored, but then saw a message saying the "console state had changed" and NOTHING worked at all. An error message said the dongle could not be read or was missing.
After panicking, I force rebooted (because no CIA browser) by holding down the power key for 5 seconds. On restart, system complained about the improper shutdown, did it's file system check, then booted up and worked normally all day long.
Googling on this hasn't been helpful, though I see ETC does use dongles for some of their software products. There doesn't appear to be any kind of hardware key plugged into the exterior of our Element though, the manual makes no mention, and I'm kind of surprised a purpose-built device like the Element would use one at all -- though I guess you could stick one on the motherboard internally to verify the hardware platform is as expected...
Anyway, do you think this was just a glitch in The Matrix, or the start of some more chronic problem? And what's up with dongles?
