Ahh.. that would have been an important detail to mention upfront in the other thread ;) People hardly use the simulator anymore because it's so limited. Nowadays, you can easily run a ccm off a virtual machine so you can have a lab equipment without a single server.. all you need is a free virtual machine software and the software itself. CCM5 is the only problematic release as you cannot really install it and it won't run without a license, but CCM6 and above have a limited license that is enough for development and there's no licensing prior to CCM4.

I think the dial is the only function that actually works with the sim but I'm not even sure about that as I've stopped using the simulator 4 years ago and moved to a real (albeit not no a server but a regular windows box) ccm.

I guess you'll have to set up wireshark on the machine running the simulator and look at the skinny packet exchange to see if you get any kind of clue why things don't work out. E.g. one thing to look for is if the device does the TFTP request and gets its configuration, if it checks the firmware version, etc.