hey all,

i appologise for newbie questions, but here goes...i have done some minor cracking of simple software, have seen a few tutorials on cracking and patching software but am still a newb...

i have a target in which the exe is quite large (40 meg or so), PiED doesn't tell me what the language is, however i'm pretty sure it's C++. the target is protected by a dongle and license file (yes probably biting off more than i can chew) and the two are linked. ideally i would rather crack the dongle protection as the the target gets updated from time to time and hence a dongle crack would allow for the new versions to still work, but for the time being i would just like to get an understanding of how the dongle process works inside the exe and relates to the "license file" and maybe patch the exe to allow it to work without the dongle (or without the license file).

my question is...i tried to "unpack" using Pied but this seemed not to work ie the resulting exe wouldn't work...is it supposed to work after unpacking, what is the main reason for the unpacking? ami going about it the right way? i also used olly to step through the exe during execution, but this is a large file and i have little idea what i'm looking for. any point in the right direction would be appreciated. oh btw the dongle is a wibu dongle.

cheers.