>At work we use several tools with a floating license system.
>Over the past few years we have lost HUNDREDS of man hours due
>to license issues (i.e. license server going down, new software
>needing new license daemon, vendor forgetting to update our
>license, etc.).

Unfortunately this area is one that has forced many software vendors to use 
dongles and the like. It is all too easy for a corporation to use more 
copies than the licenses they have paid for.

We have floating licenses for Orcad and several other packages. There has 
never been any outages due to licence servers going down that I am aware of. 
Maybe the machines get replaced on a regular basis, and if so these are done 
out of business hours anyway. There have been a couple of instances where 
software updates required a new dongle, and some scripts weren't set up 
quite right in a change over, but it hasn't been anything like the scenario 
you describe. 

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