Bottom line, the honest will pay the price for the warez kiddies who cause this sort of protection to be necessary. There was a time when the vaporware industry used to put out such crap that it often didn't work at all or worse yet, blow the boot sector on install. There were no demos. No refunds. Industry won. Dot com companies raped the american commerce, sold stock to investors, and got rich. Warez argued that they were providing a service to people by letting them test the software before they bought. That doesn't pass the laugh test, but it did fix the problem of bad software cuz folks didn't buy once they saw how it failed. It also forced many in the industry to release demos. Dot com vaporware was exposed and fell. Unfortunately, a lot of investors lost their money. The stock market has been recoiling ever since. Now there's no legitimate use for warez at all. But folks still continue to do so and thereby causing companies to protect themselves. This protection was simple in the early days, but warez kept on hacking. Now the protection comes with a burden on the legitimate buyer. The buyer must stand on his head for each piece of software he uses in order to make it work. Industry wins again. Get used to it. By the way, did anyone ever think that part of this protection scheme is to prevent the use of a product on multiple workstations? SoftImage, EI, LW, Maya, Max, MS... all of them have an interest in licensing per workstation and there's reason for Poser to join that crowd. Poser is moving to the pro world. Would you expect to pay as much for poser in your home as a large movie production company would pay for a 400 machine environment? No? Well, then, the key would be to charge them more and you less. Charge by machine. The only problem I have with this is that I don't want to buy Poser a second time when I upgrade my machine. So I agree, there has to be a better way. But as long as the better way is controlled by a program such as suggested above, or one that generates a second key based on last name, etc, it can be hacked. Right now the only way to really control is with a hardware dongle. Its easier for the DOJ to arrest folks selling fake dongles than it is to track down the myriad of electronic cracks throughout the world. But hardware dongles cost money for the company. Activation codes shift that cost onto the consumer. So get used to it. Industry wins again.