This isn't an actual response to the question at hand, but I thought I'd share something I'm using in my current development project having to do with keygens etc... The program I'm writing is for a very, very small market, consisting only of our 10-20 customers, so crackers are not a worry for me. However, to make this program worthwhile, we are charging a quarterly fee to actually use the app, which presents the problem of what to do if somebody will not pay. Most of out customers (believe it or not) do not have internet access, so that method is immediately tossed out the window. My theory here is to make the app expire at a certain date, and require a new code to unlock it until a new future time. Luckily for me, each customer has a unique identifier already used in the program, and the program is date sensitive, so I don't have to worry about them changing their computer clocks to run it. I'm also dealing with some VERY dumb users, so the less things they have to deal with, the better. What I've done is to create a code based on the expiration date (expressed as a true julian date - this was a very usefull thing) and their unique ID, along with a checksum or two built-in to the code (kind of the like credit card numbers). Really wasn't all that difficult, and all they have to do is enter a 8 digit code every 3 months, and the program can decode the date and unlock itself. Obviously this won't work in a lot of cases, but its a good solution for this situation, so I thought I'd share.. I guess I'm just in a typing mood today :) Back to work! Danie

I love your analogy of "cracking a peanut with a sledge hammer" !!! I'd definately be interested in your report thingy ( <-- technical word).. so please do post it if you ever get around to finishing it

I won't even pretend to give any sort of 'professional' advice, but in my current project, I'm using plain HTML files. The advantages I saw are that a) it's free - the only external program needed is IE and b) printing is taken care of by IE, so I don't really have to worry about it - this was a big concern, especially since some users will be printing on dot-matrix printers. Instead of actually writing much code for my reports, I use HTML templates sectioned out in comment lines and variables that I find and replace. It makes the report very easy to write from scratch and see how it will look, and it makes changes easier. Well, I hope I came off more coherent than I feel.. if not, I apologize :) Danie