Hi Jos,

>I have tried Armadillo several times over the years and each time I have always experienced problems, access violation errors, memory read/write failures, and so forth. These problems have prevented me from running my apps properly. On the other hand Konxise has never given me a problem in over 3000 installations.

I Never experienced any problems with Armadillo. Konxise is a product that is aiming on the compression of the exe and actually has no further security other than the compression. For an experienced cracker it would be a piece of cake to crack Konxies where armadillo is more difficult to track.

>There have been several Armadillo cracks over the years while I know of none that are available for Konxise. Granted this may be due in part to the fact that Armadillo protects any exe while Konxise is VFP specific.

As I said, I think you'll have to distinguish between a crack for the products usage (which has been done quite a few times, I agree) and the cracking the exe protection mechanism, which I only know one more or less succesfull adventurous attempt while this strategy probably won't apply to protected VFP exe's.

>Lastly, most importantly, the hacker who has the necessary skills and motivation to crack an app protected with Konxise also has essentially the skills and motivation required to crack an app protected with Armadillo.

No I don't agree with this statment. Armadillo has been setup as an exe protection system, while konxise has not. The konxise 'protection'is way better to crack with the proper tools because it never was setup to protect the exe. Armadillo OTOH, has many protection mechanisms against the most common cracking strategies. Only very experienced and smart hackers will be able to crack it.

But in one sense you're right. Since armadillo has a huge market outside the VFP arena it is way more susceptible to cracking attempts.

>It is the same question; what do you want to protect, from who, for how long. In this I think Konxise does a good job and I have never had a problem with it. But nothing is, of course, full-proof.

Sure, to be honest I seldom protect my executables at all (other than removing the sourcecode). If a client decides to copy the product, they need support. The products I write seldom can be used without proper training and support. Maybe that is the best solution against cracking.

Walter,