Colin,

I think part of the problem is that you're asking for somebody on UT who did pay for Refox, to break their user agreement to benefit you and them, while denying Jan B (author of Refox) his dues.

This is not the first such request and I can recall decompile requests from people who have no rights to the source but simply want to copy and sell it themselves. Not saying this is what you're doing, but hopefully you see why people are reluctant to assist such requests.

And of course current licensees want Jan to stay keen on maintaining his system which is why we would prefer you to pay him!

To avoid paying for Refox there are other ways to pick apart a standard VFP executable but you can anticipate hours of time to learn the technique. What is your time worth? Or, there are various freeware VFP hacks/decompilers if you want to sleuth them down.

Another advantage of Refox is that you can apply protection to your own work in future. Very few people can decompile the latest Refox meaning your work can't be picked apart by somebody else wanting it for free. Even if you think this isn't an issue for your work, Refox exes are much smaller than VFP ones (quarter of the size or less) which can make distribution easier. So there's no disadvantage. Another option would be Defox that is *very* hard to crack, with only one person publicly having succeeded in a pick-apart challenge by its author Leonid. Defox is free. Or, you could use my current favorite VFP Compiler that future-proofs your work by fixing the bugs MS didn't fix and allowing compilation in more modern versions of C++.

But for your current issue my advice would be

1) Pay Jan his dues to get back your work. 300 quid isn't so steep if you use it repeatedly for all your work.
2) Even if you're the sole developer, get version control in place. Tortoise SVN is free and works well enough.
3) Distribute all future exes with some form of protection to dis-incentivize the idea that it can be picked apart.