Hi Luke

Well the first question I would ask is who are you trying to protect yourself from. If it is just run-of-the-mill users then almost any basic plan will do the trick. If it is medium skilled IT people with some hacking knowledge then they might know about programs that can trace disk read/writes and registry accesses. For this I would use a program like Armadillo which can implement time expiry into the exe itself. Now uninstall/reinstall does not work and you force the user to start trying to hack the exe. For determined and skilled crackers everything becomes much more difficult and I would release only crippled version and require the user to purchase the complete working version when they want it.



>Well sort of. The file is encrypted, I just want a place to put it.
>The purpose here is for a timestamp in a demo version.
>The contents is an encrypted Julian date. I've seen the market stuff
>and I'd rather do my own. So I want to park an encrypted file somewhere
>where if the user uninstalls the app, the file survives. What I've come up
>with is in order of attempts:
>
>1. "c:\windows\system32\msedms.txt"
>2. "c:\winnt\system32\msedms.txt"
>3. "c:\msedms.txt"
>4. "c:\temp\msedms.txt"
>
>All assume admin rights during install and setup. The file is created
>during setup, not install so it survives removal. The 'ms' prefix makes it
>look like an MS file (I recall my Charlemagne).
>
>I won't get into the details of my user demographic, market etc., but I believe
>this is sufficient for my purposes.
>
>Comments?
>
>Luke