Francois, I visit family in the Alsace every year and appreciate the chance to practice. ;-)

Do you think that the protection offered by molebox ultra or, why not, molebox ultra + refox, means next to nothing?

VFP's structure means that a system that bolts protection around the outside is easily breached. If you can inject your own VFP code, the entire project can be peeled out in minutes- it doesn't matter how high the castle walls are once you're inside. ;-) IMHO the only real protection is to alter the project so that peeling it out no longer delivers useful source.

I found the link to the software you mentioned a bit rough.

I too had some initial troubles, especially on a 64bit machine where the supplied bat files to assemble the needed runtimes won't work, but Chen was very responsive. Once it's going, all you need to do is run the compiler, identify the project and decide what version of VC++ you want to use/what protection features you want. Then the compiler spends some minutes firstly obfuscating and decomposing and then breaking the project into a dll and a VFP skeleton exe. Some source changes may be needed, e.g. to prevent obfuscation of variable names or functions expected by an external app or used in macro substitution, but it's minor.

Have you looked at inno install? We started using it this year to properly manage runtimes and companion flls/dlls. So far so good.