Bob,

First of all, license protection should be handled at application level and not installation level.

But to answer your question, from the technical point of view it's not possible to retrieve such information (especially not in the days of virtual machines). You can try to get your hands on the CPU serial number (if the CPU supports it and the feature is enabled), the NIC address(es), built-in HD serial number (if available; but NOT the volume serial number!), etc. Please note that all this is not bulletproof at all! Most of this will not work as expected in virtual machines (and quite a few users are running virtual machines today). For example, in our office all work is done in virtual machines. You can simply copy one VM over to another machine(s) and use it there.

BTW, don't waste your time with this kind of license protection. Hackers will crack it within minutes. There are so powerful disassembler tools available today that it does not make sense to develop your "own" protection mechanism. It's impossible to construct a key to tie a program to a particular computer.

Friedrich