Pro Mechanica Design Study

Does anyone know if Mechanica always requires a second session of Pro-E to run a Design study such as an Optimization?

When I run a design study and check the status I see this:
"Checking the model after creating elements...
No errors were found in the model.Updating the geometry...
Starting Pro/ENGINEER in the background..."

I know for a fact with the way our company has the licenses setup you cannot pull a second license for another session of Pro-E, so the design study just hangs at that point and won't go any farther.

Is there a way to get the design study to use the current session on the screen as it would when running a simple static analysis?