Thank you very much for the reply Alfred. So it would be totally legal to use someone else's product key, if I could find one? I guess I will just try to return it for refund if not.

Despite the licence being described in the EULA as ‘non-transferable’, Serif staff have always made it clear that you can give away or even sell your product key as long as you’ve permanently uninstalled the product. As I said in my previous post, I no longer need PPX5 and you can therefore have my key if it would be of use to you.

There is a universal registration key (881887) that stops you being nagged to contact a registration server that is no longer online, but you still need a product key for installation of the software. I no longer have PPX5 installed, and although I almost certainly have the discs somewhere I wouldn’t have any use for them if I ever found them, so I’d be happy to send you a note of the product key, but I don’t think I have a readily accessible copy of any patch installers for PPX5.