>However, I think you should give some consideration to the possibility that the previous programmer was being paid by 'the lines of code' he/she produced.

No, it was not the case. I already thought at it, I asked, etc. :)

>In which case I would check the following; 1) There may be other examples of perfectly worthless code in the application, 2) Make sure your own contract with the client does not contain a similar provision regarding 'per line consideration'.

Thanks God, no! :) I would never accept to work like that... unless an extremly high cost/line of code. :)))

>In this event, removing lines of code might actually compel you to pay the client for each line of code you remove. In any event I would have a competent attorney thoroughly review your contract and all of the source code from the aforementioned application.

This is very interesting. I never thought at it. Why would I pay for removing lines? Do you know a real case?

Anyway, I have an white card to do whatever I want, whatever it takes to optimize for speed some legacy FPU2.6 projects at a reasonable cost (ie, I can't rewrite everything just because I don't like the naming convention, indentation, etc :)).

>I better get back to work! :)

Well, it's not so difficult... since whatever I change in those programs, makes them faster... or at least for the first 2 of them. :))

Vlad