"1a) They give you a number without any problem. Which sort of defeats the purpose of said protection. What good is a lock if you hand out keys to everyone if they just ask?" It won't be anyone that just asks. They will knwo you are bob smith and that your serial number is 567x or whatever. "1b) They give you a number after verifying that you aren't merely trying to get a number to install illegally on another machine, or you've stolen it. And how are they going to do this without becoming annoying to the legitimate user?" As I said. A letter, etc. If you have the code you will still have the code. No biggie. "2) You can't get the number for installation because they've gone out of business and, promises to the contrary, no one is around to supply new activation codes." They are trying to impliment this so they DON'T go out of business. If I remember right it was a situation where the day after the Pro Pack was released there was over 3 times as many warez versions of the program as were actually bought. I am not sure on the exact number but it was a stupifying thing.