Topic created on: May 1, 2011 05:06 CDT by rootop .

Evening people, this would be my first R.E question here and I sure hope I'll learn tons of good stuff around here!
I'm a novice reverse engineer, but what I lack in knowledge I make up for in the will to learn it. So I don't think I'd have trouble learning this stuff, as soon as I get the time.

Anyway, my first project is to remove the licensing requirement in Intel C++ Composer XE 2011. My school holds a license for this software so this is merely to learn how stuff works.

I can upload the necessary files if it's required, it's just icl.exe and Fnp_Act_Installer.dll.

Anyway around, I've traced down where Warning is issued and the program exits. I found the SUB function that does all the licensing checking and tried to NOP out the CALL. And what do you know, it works! It actually worked!
Now, the problem however is that as soon as I save the modifications, somehow the license check function get's called anyway. When I run the new modified version in Olly it'll get to that function on a different VA than before and ultimately end up in an Access Violation Exception.

So, any ideas what's up? I'll be happy to add some instructions and or images to help explain my issue if asked for.

Oh and also, how do you located module calls? And how would I go about removing a Dll dependency once I've removed any calls?

Nevermind, I solved it eventually. It just didn't include all NOPs when I saved the executable.

But the question remains, how would I go about relocating the code and removing the DLL dependency?