You know the problem. A program is misbehaving on your computer so you decide to fully remove it and then reinstall it. But although you have the installation CD, or you can download the installer from the vendor's web site, you can't find the installation key that you paid for. So you're unable to reinstall the program.

Or maybe you're about to upgrade your PC, and you'll need to install your software on the new machine. Again, you need those licence keys but you can't remember where you filed them.

Help is at hand, in the form of a neat piece of software called Licence Crawler. Most software products store a copy of the licence key in your PC's registry, so that they can periodically check that the key is valid. Licence Crawler scans the registry in search of those keys, and displays any that it finds. You can then paste the report into your word processor and print it out for safekeeping.

Licence Crawler is only a 1.4 MB download and the file is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust. Note that the download links will lead to pages in German and other non-English languages, but it should be obvious where the correct button is.

The program is free of charge for domestic non-commercial use. Sadly, presumably in anticipation of being used in a company environment, it does nag you about paying when you start using it. But it's worth continuing with the program, as the information it eventually produces is really useful.  Read More