Oh, and another example of publishers treating loyal customers like criminals:
I love the Thief series of games. I mean I *love* them. I picked up Thief 3 to give it a try, and go to install it.
It tells me basically I'm a pirate because I have an image mounting program called Daemon Tools (old version too, the new one is crap). Now I work in IT, and it's a hell of a lot easier to mount an ISO of a CD than to go digging through the stack, especially since hard drive storage is so cheap these days. But the game apparently scans the registry for several legitimate programs that let you emulate a DVD drive and kicks you out if you have any of them.
It was annoying, but I uninstalled Daemon Tools. Go to play the game, and it STILL KICKS ME OUT, saying that since I *had* the program on my computer, it could still find traces of the program and wouldn't let me play.
At this point I downloaded the crack, reinstalled Daemon Tools, and gave the finger to Eidos. Wrote them an irate email, saying that it shouldn't be an expectation to dig through my registry by hand if I want to play the game, and that it was doubtful that everyone who had the same problem I did was capable of editing the registry safely.
Of course, I never got a response.