Quite honestly I never really bother with trying to make software I work on difficult to crack. Firstly, as many people have already stated, if somebody wants to crack your software, they will. Secondly, anybody who actually installs cracked software was never likely to actually purchase a copy from you anyway. When you want to buy the latest MS product, do you search all of the warez sites? - or do you pick up the nearest computer software catalogue? Saying this, I do frequently visit a whole list of 'top' warez sites, etc, to keep on top of what is happening to software packages I have worked on. I do laugh a bit when I see some software that I have worked on available to download - it is nice to know somebody out there liked it enough to crack it. Also, I have to admit that I 'leaked' a 'special' version of some software I was working on about a year ago to most of the warez sites, etc, that had a whole range of dead-ends for the crackers to follow. Even now that the final release has been out around 4 months, it has not yet been cracked. The crackers probably remeber the hard time they had with the 'dummy' version! This isn't to say that ignoring the possibility is good, but you lose more money trying to combat these cheaters than you'd ever making selling software to them