thanks frank. of course any vba project passwords can be "exploited" in seconds using existing workarounds... and then the code is available. You can then reverse the decrypting routine - except that things like blowfish are open source - i had the idea of the blowfish system - the only way to decypt the code even having the decyption code is to brute force the password... the hard part then is to actually have the decryption password "safe"... was just a point for discussion.
cheers.