I have a couple of custom-developed applications that I market in "shrink-wrap" fashion. The application anti-piracy system reads the Hardware ID from the Hard Drive in order to generate a serial number that is then matched to another number to unlock the application. The application is written in VFP 8 and Codemine 7.1.

All of a sudden, one of my own compputers started crashing on the apps for no reason. After looking around a bit, I discovered that it was generating a Hardware ID of F instead of the mandatory 6 numeric serial number - and thus the registration routine stopped working. This happened to an already functioning application on a computer that had previously not had this problem.

This problem had been reported by two users on different occasions but we dismissed them as "flukes". Now that its happened to me I'm taking it very seriously.

No hardware was changed on this computer of mine. It is running XP Home with SP1. Norton 2004. I have also used Sybot and Adaware.

Help!