Tenacious,
I was told that they will soon do away with the floppy and issue the keyfile over the net. Here's the kicker, their server will poll your system and record the serial number of your harddrive! What's to keep anyone on the net reading your entire registry?
Just out of curiosity, what does this have to do with the OS? More than likely, the vendor will supply you with software that does this by reporting back to the "mothership" and isn't something inherent in the OS itself.
However, this is a really bad policy on the part of the vendor. You might remember some tax software from a few years ago that did something similar; they responded to the overwhelming negative consumer backlash by backpedaling away from the offensive technology. I've noted that manufacturing software vendors are pretty bad about this - they can more easily get away with it because they tend to have a captive market which consists of a very small number of fairly loyal customers. Some vendors still even use *dongles* of all things!
Probably the best thing to do in this case is contact the vendor and let them know you won't be buying from them again because you can't trust their scanning software. After all, yours is a business which has secrets which need to be protected, and opening the barn door to an outside agency accessing a machine on your internal network just isn't acceptable. Then follow through and buy from a competitor who isn't using such a draconian copy protection scheme.
