VirtualAcorn Registration Misery

I bought VirtualAcorn's top-of-the-line package, RPC-AdjustSA at
Wakefield on Saturday - imagine my surprise when I hurried home to
install the software...only to find that it needed "activation" which
I'm not a big fan of. There was no option to activate the product on-
line (at least Windows XP despite its many faults, lets you do this),
I needed to send an email to VirtualAcorn as prompted in the
registration dialog, which I did.

I received no response, so I visited their website...only to find that
apparently they're on holiday at the moment, and won't be back until
28th May. Marvelous. Then I spotted that they're still available via
email for registration/activation and technical support, which is fair
enough. So I emailed them on Saturday afternoon...and have heard
nothing since. I tried emailing them from another account rather than
my GoogleMail account in case for some reason, my email via GoogleMail
had been blocked, but to no avail.

I tried ringing their offices anyway and received a recorded message
saying that they won't be available until Tuesday 29th May, even later
than claimed on their website.

So in summary, I've bought a product that:

a) Cannot be activated on-line
b) The vendor is not replying to my registration emails
c) The vendor cannot be contacted over the phone.

I'm rapidly beginning to think that I've spent £120 on little more
than a useless CD and matching case although at least I have a real
RISC OS license in there. What's more, I bought quite a quantity of
software at Wakefield (some of it very expensive) as I'm just getting
into RISC OS, and that is all sat idle as well, because I have no way
to run it.

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh here - I met Aaron at Wakefield and
he seemed a genuinely nice guy, and was only too happy answer any
questions that I had. I'm guessing that he's gone on a much-deserved
holiday - I know myself that running a small business is very
demanding, and I appreciate the fact that he's still offering support
(apparently) via email in the meantime.

However, it seems madness to me that VirtualAcorn would set up a stall
at Wakefield and have presumably, a very successful day selling plenty
of copies of VirtualAcorn...only to immediately annoy all their new
customers by rendering their software completely useless because no
registration requests are being answered. Not a great first
impression.

I could understand if VirtualAcorn have been swamped out with
registration requests due to high sales on Saturday and are struggling
with a backlog. Even if the activation codes are generated manually
and thus they haven't got round to sending them out yet, at least they
could have replied to my email saying something along the lines of
"Sorry for the delay, we're working through a backlog of registration
requests, your registration code will be emailed to you shortly"
rather than giving no response at all. Even if generating an
activation code is time consuming, hitting the reply button and
pasting in a standard response doesn't really take that long.

Has anyone else here bought a copy of VirtualAcorn at Wakefield?
Have your registration requests been accepted, or are you still
waiting like me?

One understanding, but also very disappointed new customer,

Nick.

.