I'm working on a VB5 app (latest version of Encrypted Magic Folders). I'm trying to reverse-engineer the snake-oil they call encryption, but the VB is driving me nuts. I got SmartCheck, but the thing gets an access violation and quits right off. I figure it must be some kind of anti-debugger trick; the only one I found described well in a tute was one that timed ops to see if they ran slower because of smartcheck, so I turned off event viewing, but it still crashed. What other kinds of VB debugger shields have you all seen?

I also got the pcode disassembler from http://members.xoom.com/c4n4ever/.space/ but it failed right away, too.

I'm making progress with softice, but it's awful wading through all the crap that's in there.

A small snippet
if there is a messagebox that says serial number is invalid
than that messagebox is most probably a MessageBoxIndirectA
msvbvm60.dll and the i think v5 of it uses the above function to display a messagebox
I dont know much about VB thingie but in the past i cracked 2 VB apps by setting a BP on MessageBoxIndirectA in SoftICE
Good Luck...

I'm not trying to register it, I'm trying to reverse-engineer it. I want to know how the encryption works. I'm attacking decrypt.exe, BTW.

do you have ida ? Normally it could show you usual vb functions that could help you understand what's happening in this app.
you can maybe have some docs on typiczl vb function at msdn site.