Sorry Anthony got news for you, if going by the Avatar Lab is any example, reformatting the hard drive does require re-activation, since that is exactly what happened, I reformatted my harddrive with Avatar Lab on it, and after reinstalling, the challenge code was new, and the attempt to re-register it, was greeted with the response this product is already registered, and cannot be registered again. Now I simply have had neither the time or patience to get into the rest of it, an email marathon to re-activate it. The end result, was that formatting left me with an unuseable Avatar Lab, and by appearances, much more significant steps involved to re-activate it. Not something in my opinion paying customers should be subjected to.