Yes I know it doesn't have an installer. My point was if I wanted to remove all traces of Photo Mechanic from the machine - should I deactivate it first before I do so? And then I would download and drag and drop PM into the Applications folder and then reactivate PM. There has to be some difference between the two machines. Since the machine on which I installed PM most recently doesn't exhibit the bouncy icons I thought a complete "reboot" for lack of a better term, might eliminate the problem.
In the end all it bought me was a machine without an active seat since the deactivation isn't registering on your server and every time I try to reactive it tells me that I already have 3 seats active.
To remove all traces of PM on a system would require deactivating, removing preferences, the Browse with Photo Mechanic service (if you added it), and the Photo Mechanic application itself.
When you deactivated, did PM acknowledge the deactivation and then quit, or did it fail? Are you still able to launch Photo Mechanic successfully on that system?
I don't think that the process you're going through will make any difference though. There is no preference or other setting that PM uses that would cause an icon to appear on the dock when PM executes the Video Render helper.
I would suspect differences in the OS version/updates on the different systems as the problem. Make sure that the system that exhibits the problem is completely up to date on its system updates.
-Kirk