A passing thank you to gjsman-1000 as his words resurfaced some history. As one with many years behind the curtain I recall an old trick that many glanced over since only 'advanced developers' long ago understood the impact: Compiling public releases as debug. Many a software would fail to strip the debug symbols from their code and so the games began. Using Softice and ollydbg along with ones favorite hex editor capable of sprinkling a few nop nops where needed and boom. The really bad ones were the companies that failed to comprehend what the pdb file was and shipped that with releases in debug mode - OOPS, there goes the i.p.