A client in a secured government facility used a custom Paradox application to manage employees, track hours, parts, labor, and generate invoices. The hardware on which the program existed was failing and other contractors had been unable to migrate it to a new system.

The client was required to change the program logic for how it calculated invoices, however the company which developed the application no longer had the developer on staff, no longer had the source code for the "delivered" (binary only) sections, and did not have the administrative password.