MOK  I bought this program after accidentally losing almost all my pictures and memories. I used it program to scour many hard drives and laptops that, at some point, had contained my pictures. For what this program did -- recover many photos that I thought I had lost forever -- it was worth every penny and much more.

However, I felt that much could be improved. Scanning a 30GB and 120GB disks took over 12 hours of 100% CPU computations. In neither case did the analysis actually end by itself: I had to click "Cancel", after which, the program retrieved whatever files it had found. If I left the program scan my drive much longer, it sometimes would stop responding and would have to be force quit. There is no real progress indicator, just a fake indicator that goes from 0% to 100% a million times. Since you only see the last 4-5 pictures it saw, and those are usually bogus pics that came from a random app on the hard drive, there's no way to know how many pictures have been found, what they look like, and what percentage of the disk has been scanned. The programs also retrieved some very large movie .avi files, and all .pdf and .wav that it found. I suspect a lot of time was spent reconstituting these large movies and I wish there was the option to skip them and focus on the pictures. I'm disappointed by the fact that I suspect that I could have found more pictures (though it did find 12,000 pictures in perfect condition, many of which were the ones I was looking for)...

So all in all, the interface is spartan, there are not enough options, and progress feedback is woefully lacking. On a hard drive, the scanning is also extremely SLOOOW. But on the other hand, it did find a huge number of perfect/uncorrupted pictures (and PDF/AVI/WAVs) in erased and overwritten hard drives, and for that alone, this program was a life saver (but an imperfect one).  
(Version 3.1.1.10323)

MOK  I really like the concept of this app and even thought about buying it, but I can't understand why the daemon is routinely taking 2GBs of space (2GBs!!! whaaaa!?) and CleanApp itself uses 10% of a Core 2 Duo processor even at rest! This aspect definitely needs improvement.  
(Version 2.4.2)

MOK  Careful! This program hosed my Leopard mac. After installing and launching, immediately a few of my apps stopped responding and went into a ghost state in which they could not be force quit under any means (I've never seen anything like it before). A soft logout or restart stopped working too, so I did a hard reboot and my mac would not make it past a blue screen. Tried over and over again, couldn't even get to the login screen. I rebooted from my OSX DVD, opened the Terminal.app and looked for recently modified files in the /System directory. Guess what: the newest file was a GlowWorm kernel extension. I moved this out of the way (the only change I did), rebooted and my system now works perfectly again. This is program super flaky, I have NEVER had a program prevent my mac from booting before.

I realize that it's hard to maintain free software, but when it comes to kernel extensions, my tolerance for flakiness is very low. Use caution.  
(Version 1.5.3b4)

MOK  InquisitorX works fine with Safari, and work similarly to acid search.   
(Version 3.0b)

MOK  Acquisition is one of the few sharewares that I have  decided to keep and support after having tried it and seen how much I liked it. Widely distributing a crack for a  well-written application from a small developer seems to me, well... disgusting, for lack of a better word, especially when the developer isn't even crippling the program.

There are very many free alternatives to Acquisition, so if you're using this program, it means that you appreciate the work behind it. If you use the program (and you aren't forced to), then either pay for it, or live with the minor nagging, but putting this crack on MacUpdate is just plain sick since it will cut off the developer's revenue.

BTW, I'm not rich and don't have heaps of cash to throw on shareware, it's just that publicly undermining the small guys like this feels beyond wrong to me.  
(Version 1.0)