We have a website maintained by an old employee and it appears it\'s encoded by Zend Guard including all backups.
I know a little about Zend Optimizer, but never con
Free tools all over the place can do this now:
http://www.showmycode.com/
The entire point of the very expensive software tool Zend Guard is to encrypt code so that it can not be decoded. That is the point.
If obfuscation is not on, then there is a possibility that you may be able to get a professional to get the code back, less comments and formatting by means of hacking the code engine. If obfuscation is on, then it's easier to rewrite it to be honest.
Have a read of this article from the Zend site, I know it is a biased source but they are right: http://forums.zend.com/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=2242