Personally, I don't worry about it at all. I've seen lots of companies and individuals spend litterlly 100's of hours (equaling 1000's of dollars if not more) on protecting their software. In the end if they would have spent the hours adding features or fixing bugs they would have been better off.

Also encryption/decryption of EXE's or compression of EXE's only leads to more of the exe being forced into memory at runtime. Thus bloating the run footprint of the application.

If a hacker or attacker wants your stuff they will get it. Personally if I find a "Hack" copy of something of mine on the web I'm proud that it was good enough to be hacked and hope that the honest people will like it enough to buy a license. Of course I've released very little as pay-ware, usually opting for a freeware license overall.