Thanks - a very sneaky and clever approach:)

>Personally, I would bury it in the registry under a key that looks very important. For the stored expiration or install date value, I would store a hashed value of the date. You would need a way to de-hash the stored date so you can do a proper validation.
>
>The way I handle this for real in one of my apps is to limit the number of records certain critical tables can have. Then when they exit the app, I run code similar to the following:

>IF DEMO_VERSION  && constant from my header file
>   delete from customers where recno() > 10
>   delete from invoices where recno() > 20
>   delete from lineitem ;
>       where invoice not in (select invoice from invoices)
>   delete from postings ;
>       where invoice not in (select invoice from invoices)
>   delete from inventory where recno() > 50
>   close tables all
>   use customers excl
>   pack
>   use invoices excl
>   pack
>   use lineitem excl
>   pack
>   use postings excl
>   pack
>   use inventory excl
>   pack
>ENDIF

>My demo versions are always single user and I check to make sure at app launch that no other instance is running. I also scatter that DEMO_VERSION caveat through out my app to prevent them from running certain parts of it.