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Well I have XP and 2000 machines, do you think it would install on either of those?

Does anyone have a copy of VB3 they would be willing to give or sell me? Or know where I can find one?

Interesting question, I put in exactly as much effort as is necessary for the solution to be maintainable and decipherable, and not an ounce more. I specifically name any object that I work with in code, and leave everything else to whatever Access decided to name it. I do follow standard...

Wow. Who would have predicted that a thread complaining about ad placement would turn into the stock political argument of AWF? On second thought, probably anyone familiar with this forum would have predicted that. I still find the ads horrendously annoying, but it sounds like it is just me -...

Sounds like you've got it pretty well worked out - I hope your deployment goes well.

Also, what stops them from copying the mde to multiple computers after activation?

Yes, thats a creative solution, but not really what I'd call a commercial distribution . . . what if you wanted to sell 5000 copies, that would be a ridiculous amount of work!

So every customer gets a unique installer?

It looks like you have a good start, I hope it works well for you. I may not be understanding your code properly, but it looks like they could enter any value and as long as that value hadn't been entered before, it would be valid.

Having a custom built installer kind of means you aren't doing a commercial distribution, right? If you do a phone home scenario, if you don't encrypt the communication, there is nothing to stop someone from sniffing out the calls to your server. They could then use that information to write...

So what's to stop them from running the installer on another computer with the same activation key? How does the prepackaged program know that a particular activation key has already been used?

Well it is pretty easy to have a code that is too much trouble to hack. The issue is how does the Access application know that the activation has occured, and how do you keep people from fooling the application into thinking that the activation has occured? For instance, if you do the...

Right, well now we are back to what is appropriate for different scenarios. If you are attempting to sell a commercial product, then there is incentive to get it for free.

Obviously you won't want to discuss exactly how this works in a public forum, but I am curious about how you accomplish this. For instance, once your program is intalled on one computer, what stops someone from simply copying the mde, backend, etc. to another computer?

Bingo. You can spend all the time in the world trying to lock down an Access application, but at the end of the day, your time would be better spent upgrading to a solution that is appropriate for the scenario.

It is really hard to make this work. Where does the activation key come from? How do you prevent keys from being reused? What happens when your customer doesn't have an internet connection? How does the program know whether it has been activated or not? How do you prevent people from...

I would be very interested to see what you come up with. Does your process include "phoning home"? I am curious because one problem I have run into is that a lot of antivirus software, and even things like video drivers interfere with this type of process when you use encryption.

Did you try it? From your explanation of the problem, you DO want unique records. If 2 programs show up in the same day, that would still be 2 unique records, assuming you have a key field. If you do not have a key field, then you are out of luck.

From my experience, you are in for a world of heartache going down this road with MS Access. Others have pretty well spelled out your options. My 2 cents is that you should abandon this idea outright. If you really think you have a commercially viable product, invest in coverting it to a real...

I have had that happen to me before. Is your report based on a query? It might help you trace your problem if you make a select query that shows the correct records (i.e., no doubles) and then base your totals query on that. You might need to set unique records = true.