Good evening all,

So I'm the IT help for multiple businesses, ranging from server deployment to standard desktop user issues. And today one of my clients asked If there was a way for me to help them with some very old proprietary software. They purchased the software back in 2005 and the software is required to work with some medical equipment. They did not use the software for a while and now they are trying to use it, and it's asking them for some sort of activation key. The software is offline, so it's not trying to connect to some server, running on Windows XP It definitely looks old. For the software to work it needs two things. A "code" and a "key". The code seems to be machine/equipment specific cuz he showed it to me on two different Windows XP machines and they were both different codes, random letters and numbers with some spaces. But when I installed the software on my own computer for testing, it does not populate the code field. It's possible that it needs to be hooked up to the equipment to populate that field.

Anyways, we contacted the company in an attempt to get the key, and they are saying it's too old for them to help. Somehow they kept no records of stuff from 20 years ago, and his only option is to purchase newer stuff. But that includes purchasing equipment and software. So he is hoping there is some way to figure out the key.
If this is just a lost cause, I understand. Just trying to see if I can assist him at all. The CD has the typical setup.exe and config files, an MSI file, an isscript file, txd files. Just mentioning that in case it helps identify how it was made. And yes I'm purposely not saying the name of the software yet cause I'm just seeing if this is a waste of time.

When I attempt to look at the About it says "could not open entry check file". The software seems to not work correctly in a windows 11 environment. Obviously. I'm creating a virtualbox to see if I can get more info.