CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I use windows for one reason--to run Dragonfly Software's Glass Eye 2000--a stained glass design application. It's basically a simple vector illustrator-type tool. The problem is that this program employs Acudata copy protection and it's not playing nice with CX. Of course, I am not here trying to defeat the protection. On the contrary, I own a Professional license, and if I am going to finally get away from running windows, I need to make this program work.

Testing is easy because Acudata Sheriff copy protection comes with the ability to distribute trial versions of apps that use it. That said, anyone can download Glass Eye 2000 from dfly.com and try it out. Here's what I know so far:

1. It needs a native MFC42.DLL. With this native DLL in place, it fires up just fine in a Win98 bottle.
2. On first run, the copy protection prompts for selecting one of several bullets (30-day trial, enter serial number and so on). For testing, I am picking the 30-day trial.
3. It opens just fine and everything seems to work great.
4. Launch a second time--New dialog forces you to confirm that you are continuing the trial period.
5. Works fine again
6. Thrid time launched, I get an error with special codes telling me to contact the manufacturer, as there is a licensing problem.

SO, from what I can gather, the app itself is functioning great. It's the Acudata Sheriff that's causing the grief. I do know that it drops at least 3 DLLs into the System32 directory, SheriffNet.dll, winsusrm.dll and winsusrx.dll. It also creates a Sheriff folder in the Windows directory that contains a product key and some license files.

Has anyone had to work through this or some other app that uses Acudata Sheriff? Again, I am NOT trying to defeat the protection, just manage through it to confirm it's working as a trial first, before I enter my serial number (I am hesitant because I need to UNLICENSE one install to license another, and if I cannot get in to UNLICENSE the app later, I could lose my license when I have to rebuild the bottle.) Any ideas?

Well, it appears as though Sheriff, the licensing component of the app described above, uses an algorithm that checks the CPU speed when it builds the license code for each install. This algorithm is designed to take a combination of hardware settings to generate a unique "system signature" which it keeps and cross checks on each application launch. There is a known issue with this technique that sometimes affects laptop users that have dual core Intel processors! This is because the CPU speed check can elicit different results from the CPU which may report one speed one moment and another speed the next as a result of power consumption, heat and single versus multi-core performance at that particular point in time. I believe this is the cause of my problem, and I have doubts about there being anything CX can do about that since it sometimes crops up on a system running Windows natively. Working with the application developer, I learned that they are coincidentally abandoning this protection scheme in an upcoming software update which should alleviate the problem altogether.