Zend Encoder

Hi, My company is looking into using the Zend Encoder to enforce licensing of some tools that I'm developing and I have a few questions that I hope someone who's used it can answer: 1) I understand that when you encode your files, they will stop working when the zend license expires. how easy is it to get them working again after you renew? do the pages need to be re-encoded from source? 2) Will files encoded on a windows machine run on linux with the zend optimizer? 3) are there any known problems with certain php modules (ming, gd, mcal) 4) are there competing products I should be looking at? thanks, - Mark