I think Elbox is very "unprofessional" for...
2) Rebadging a generic card as their own and writing a driver for it instead of writing a universal driver that works with any NEC USB card.
You'd probably be suprised how often this happens then. I've seen generic graphics cards with custom roms sold for treble the price of the generic ones, you're paying for the whole package & not just the raw materials.
Like all companies, they are here to make money. If writing the software was free then someone else would have done it by now. Using the hardware as a dongle is the only way they can protect their investment from rampant piracy (which you have to admit is what would happen if they tried to recoup their costs and didn't protect it).
I don't think corrupting the hard drive is good practise though. Putting random read/write errors on usb device access should be enough. If you don't think thats professional then you probably don't want to pirate nero burning rom, as they have had code that corrupts your cd/dvd burns.
