No one can, legally or ethically, "suggest a workaround."
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, "of course, of course," that your intentions
are scrupulously legitimate. (I think that's perfectly reasonable, since companies
do die.) Therefore, you need to do some gumshoe work to chase down that company or its successor. If they still exist, or if the copyright has been transferred to a new owner, you have a legal obligation to them ... as you well know. So you need to approach the problem from both a compliance standpoint and a technical one.
You should notify your corporate counsel or legal-affairs department in
any case. A formal, dated memorandum (e-mail) of the type that can be put into a file and suitably forgotten.
(I "winky" here, but it is important ... as you well know.) You're showing
due diligence, a critical factor in any "innocent infringement" defense in the unlikely event of litigation. (
Translation: you are covering your butt.)
You
can poke around to see if there's any sort of a firewall or
iptables issue on the local box ... but, that "-15" appearing in that IP-address field looks very odd to me. (It's anybody's guess how well they actually debugged their own licensing code.) Maybe a little bit of network-sleuthing with an appropriate tool ("ethereal" is more-or-less the de facto choice here) will help you to see what kinds of communication the program is trying to make, and what is blocking it. If the root cause of the problem is simply a communication issue, this will help you resolve it.
