Is it possible...

...that the company involved had the licenses for the software, but the install techies used one copy of CD and one serial number for all the machines?

I've seen that happen when lazy engineers put a copy of the install CD on the network to save them from 'wasting time getting the CD out' etc. Fine for Volume Licenses like Office, but bad for indivdual license [for products where you can't justify buying 100 licenses at once, like Adobe CS2 etc] obviously.

Also, I'll put £10 on Winzip and other 'trial' programs being part of it due to them being free to download, but not free for commercial use.

Lazy engineers + users with install rights = problems.