[Squidge]

What you say is correct - you can never stop a hacker that has bought a copy of your program from being able to release a version stripped of the protection regardless of whether it is protected by a software program (eg. AsProtect) or hardware device (eg. dongle).

However, what you can do is make there cracking more difficult, and hope that they will give up and hack something else instead. ASProtect contains many routines to do this, but they don't seem to be ever used (authors only seem to use the examples provided with the protector, which the hackers also have, so can easily work around them).

What you need to do is study the protector of your choice and see exactly what can be accomplished. For example, in ASProtect you can do multiple calls into your application before you reach the starting address of your code, such as initialise critical variables and the like. You can also use calls embedded in your code to ensure asprotect is still launching your code and it's not be stripped.

However, even with all these features, it's still just a matter of time before being hacked and distributed. The only thing that stops this is that if your program is specialist app that not many people want, then crackers normally don't bother as they will not get recognition for it (as no-one is interested in the app that they have cracked, so doesn't get distributed as quickly/as wide).

About Armadillo: CopyMem-II has some serious weaknesses, and due to these weaknesses, it's easy to decrypt the entire program without knowing the encryption key unless you protect the program using a custom certificate (so there's no demo version of your program available).