Hi! I think I found a solution, it's strange but it works for me.
As usual, after having installed the game and the 2.1 patch, mount the image of the game in the virtual DVD player with daemon tools, then open it and go to: Data folder and double click on X3TC.exe. It may work.

What image of the game are you talking about?

Well, sounds like a nice idea, it even works....... but the game runs from the image, which has the basic version (1.01)... soooooo that plan doesn't really work. :P
Was a nice try tho... and sounded a lot less insane than the working way (20 instances) :P.

hxxp://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=258911

Read the changelog. No ETA given for the patch yet, but most likely it will be out until December. Egosoft respects again its promise to remove the copy protection after one - two years. They will also re-release the game without a copy protection as they already did in the past with other titles in the X series.

With this being on the way, i think this topic reached its end.

P.S.: patch 2.5 is out. No more CD-checks. Protection removed, bugs fixed and new stuff added to the game.