I spend quite some time running FS9 and bought a ton of addons for it. My backup hard drive failed a few years ago and I've lost all my installers for the addons. I haven't touched FS9 in a long time afterwards but I feel the guilt of wasting all the money for this great software. So I thought it would be nice to get it running again.

However, I keep running into the same issues:

• Download links in emails for the product no longer work.
• Download links and activations expired.
• Companies that don't exist anymore.
• Broken Installers
• Every product having it's own way of being activated.
• Sometimes the anti-piracy mechanisms kick in anyways.
• Some keys are still generated manually by sending an email. Many of them don't respond anymore.
• Needing to disable anti-virus for installation
• Trying to deal with Flight Sim's broken scenery handling.

Unfortunately, I've had to resort to pirate some of the addons that I've paid for. I have to sometimes manually extract installers. I had to peek through the Wayback Machine often hopelessly.

Also, these addons have some of the most intrusive and stringent anti-piracy systems I've ever seen. Sometimes, it's downright criminal and evasive. I've written entreprise software that costs thousands of dollars per license. There was one installer that took care of everything, no registry keys to change or anything. Just put a serial number and press activate.

I didn't even start installing anything and already feel like giving up. I want what I paid for back and it's going to take going to take at least a week.