Hi - hope this is the right forum. If not, please feel free to move it to wherever it should go.

I have an app that is protected via a dongle. I am not the developer of the software; I am the end user who has purchsed a license for the app. The app makes periodical calls to the dongle to check that it's there; one of these calls occurs when the app is instructed to shut down. This is evidenced by a flash that occors in the dongle. Occasionally - and seemingly randomly - there is no call to the dongle when instructed to shut down. When this occurs, the app hangs. Using TM/end process does not shut the app down completely. It shuts the GUI down, but there are still threads running. I am not the only one with this issue.

Before anyone starts to think that I am asking how to bypass the dongle - no. That is not what I seek here. What I was hoping to learn, is if there is some way to ensure that the aforementioned dongle call is made 100% of the time, as opposed to most of the time. As you can probably imagine, this is not an open source product, and being that none of you have the ability to look at any code, this understandably might be a longshot. But I have to try.

Maybe what I am looking for here, is something system-specific (which I would therefore have in common with all of the other users who have the same issue), that would cause an app - or the driver itself - to not communicate with it's protection device, be it the chipset, the MOBO itself, etc. Maybe something having to do with the way the BIOS are set? Maybe there is some 3rd party app that might be able to force communication between the app, driver, and dongle? I know that's a stretch, but...

I do have the latest dongle drivers, and the lateset version of the app itself. And this is not a new issue; it is 4.5 years old, and is across four versions of the sw.

This post might be a little light on info; if anyone thinks that they might be able to offer some assistance, I will be happy to publish more info if need be. I just figured it might be best to keep the initial post as straightforward and simple as possible.

Thanks in advance for any insight!