Phil
re: Question 3-5
Sat Nov 14 17:25:34 1998


Hey...

Question 3: Where would I patch this program to "Fully" register it, and why?
I would patch this program at CS:0045B9C0 7504 JNZ 0045B9C6 changing it to
7404 JZ 0045B9C6 cuz I believe that this is the main comparision between the 'real' registration key and your 'fake' registration.

About "Fully register".: I have tried many different ways to register this program, via using the correct serial number(found when using soft-ice), changing several conditional jumps(like cs:0045B9C0, or cs:0045C034), manipulating the system registry(as Jeff wisely pointed out), and the program registered whithout a problem. The nag screen at startup is gone, time restriction removed and so forth... My question is that in every one of them, when I go to the 'Help' menu and then 'About,' a screen shows up stating that if you continue using this program after 30 days to please register it. Now is this considered a 'nag' screen, cuz even after you properly register the program(using the correct serial number) this screen STILL shows up. If this is considered a nag screen, then I have not found a way to get rid of it, yet. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. :)


Question 4: Locate and identify the small routine that performs the task of 'encripting' the User Name.
The routine that performs this task is located at CS:0045B97A

Question 5: Explain how we can extract the 'key' to what letters & symbols the program assigns to
the User's Name when it saves this to the System Registry file.
Well after reading the posting from Jeff, which pretty much covered this question, I had to try it out myself. First I registerd the program and found that the reg value was indeed added to the system registry( HKEY_USERS.DefaultSoftwareNoktaSoftwareUninstallManager)
ab Reg "I@X`ad" which translate to "Phil". I too tried slightly differents names, to see if there was a pattern, and there was. Like Jeff said, "I@" is always the first two symbols that appears in the reg file. So I modified the 'reg file' to 'I@abcd...xyz" to get all the symbols for lowercase letters and again 'I@ABC...XYZ" for the uppercase letters. Thus producing a template. Now we have the 'KEY' we can write our own registration code to the System Registry file WITHOUT going throught the program itself.

Phil