Ironbear, In that situation I would be breaking out my hex editors fast. A few well placed bits bypasses all registration techniques. Now for anyone wanting to know, I will not share my knowledge on how to do this with one excpetion, you already have the tools installed on your machine when you run either windows or dos. The knowledge would be aquired only by studying machine code directly. With Ironbears example it shows one reason why crackers will never be extinct. Anyone using that program is now actually using it illegally according to the EULA although they could probably win a court case stating fair use as they did have it bought and paid for, only now they need a shadier method of actually using the thing. This example also shows why I am wary of this kind of protection scheme. Legal users were the only ones hurt by this method, so in effect all they got was headaches for giving a company thier cash. If thier business relied on this application, they could have been shut down or lost even more money trying to quickly convert all of thier projects to whatever new application they decided to use.