Toni Cazorro forwarded me a link to this thread on Pocket PC Thoughts:

An interesting piece of news is floating around the Pocket PC Blogosphere: apparently the latest version of Anton Tomov’s Pocket Mechanic will hard-reset your device if you’re using an illegally-generated code for the software (i.e., a pirated copy).

According to another link, he’s basically calling into SetCleanRebootFlag() and then rebooting the device, causing the entire object store to be reset (and thus, you lose everything on your PDA).

I have no idea if it’s true or not, but I’ve personally been getting pretty tired of product activations, copy protection, etc. I certainly wouldn’t be happy if Office decided to format my hard drive if it had problems activating.

I’ve been going through my own nightmare of upgrading the hardware in my main machine (moving everything to a Shuttle cube), and having to call into various companies because product activation won’t allow me to reinstall on my new hardware. Grr.