All knees, no brains
I do work on some software for HP. Since said software is distributed world wide I occasionally get to fix bugs that turn up in languages such as Russian, Korean, Greek and Czech. I have a machine on which I can install whatever language version of Windows I need. To make my life a little bit easier, I only install it once then use Ghost, by Norton, to make a disk image I can restore later. It also makes it so I am certain I have a clean machine when I'm testing software installation: no registry crumbs left laying around.
Here is where the fun starts. Apparently someone at Norton felt the need to try and protect Ghost from being pirated. As a result in order to restore a disk image you must manually type in your 12 digit license key every single time. That would be annoying in and of itself. What takes the cake is the license key is displayed in bright bold letters on the startup screen. Oh, well done. So what exactly have we accomplished by making me type in the damn thing every single time I restore a back up if the key is displayed for me at start up!
I don't have an issue with companies trying to protect themselves from software piracy. I do have an issue with companies having a knee jerk reaction without bringing any brain cells to bear on the problem which only ends up making using the software a pain in the ass.