Hi all, I have a Cad add on (reg. and time trial) which consists of a dll, an arx and a separate registration exe. I've fished the serial with Smartcheck, registered but the time trial is giving me grief. I've tried using Olly 1.1 with the dll loader (the dll is where the protection is) but it doesn't seem to run like an exe. I've also tried deadlisting with W32dasm and IDAPro but I think I need to trace into it. Ideas?

GoatBoy,

I don't too much care for the OLLY DLL loader myself. What you can do is edit the DLL using any hexedit utility. Look in the PE Header section of the DLL. There you will find (in many cases) two bytes (They're called Characteristics. If you view them in a PE explorer utility they will look the reverse of what you see in the hexedit I show below) that you can change, which will effectively turn the DLL into an EXE so that OLLY can bring it up like a regular program. Suggest you copy the DLL to another name (if you can or don't forget to change back after testing) and:

Change "0E 21" TO "8E 81".

Good Luck!

Thanks for the quick reply...I just did what you suggested - it loaded without dlloader but it stopped running right away as it did in the loader. I'll have to work on it more tonight. Thanks again!