Understandably, the complaints got louder and angrier as no one on our engineering or prerelease teams were able to reproduce it, but easily half the bug reports were all about this issue and identical. After 2 weeks of trying every configuration of video card, OS, and any other alchemical recipe we could think of, my partner on the test team stumbled upon the license crack online while searching for anyone else having this problem but not having reported it to us directly.
As a brief respite from this ongoing madness, he decided to install the crack on a clean machine and aee how it worked so we could report it. Lo and behold, the problem reproduced on the first try. This whole time, indignant, angry users who were actively threatening our team and vowing to never use another product from our company had been bested by a poorly written crack.
Before exposing the secret, I asked dozens of the most vocal and vicious reporters to please email me a particular log file, and give me contact information where we might get in touch with them as we were close to cracking the case. (Pun intended, and this was before we had very clear rules around personally identifiable information, but even with the policy at the time, these weren’t our customers so I felt less anguish about it.). I received all of it and more, invited them to share their experiences on the forum threads, and then tactfully but clearly explained exactly why they’d seen this problem. I offered to work one on one with anyone who felt my accusation was in error, but not one single affected user replied or followed up after that message.