I guess I know exactly what you are talking about. Once upon a time I also
thought vendor daemon must be run by lmgrd, actually that is a prompt
message from FLEXlm. BUT IT IS NOT TRUE! It's a trick played by Macrovision.


There are (at least) two ways to see this through:
1. trace lmgrd.exe up to the point when vendor daemon is spawned, capture
the command line and you'll see.
2. read FLEXlm SDK source code. Hint: the key file is ls_app_init.c

I did both, and it's funny to see how simple and ridiculous it is to mislead
people like that. Afterwards you can start debugging vendor deamon directly
without lmgrd.

One thing to point out is that vendor daemon communicates with lmgrd
regularly (the "heartbeat"), so you'll see some messages when lmgrd is not
present. But that won't affect you to dig out the keys and seeds in the
vendor daemon.

Good luck!