Protecting executable from reverse engineering?

What Amber said is exactly right. You can make reverse engineering harder, but you can never prevent it. You should never trust "security" that relies on the prevention of reverse engineering.

That said, the best anti-reverse-engineering techniques that I've seen focused not on obfuscating the code, but instead on breaking the tools that people usually use to understand how code works. Finding creative ways to break disassemblers, debuggers, etc is both likely to be more effective and also more intellectually satisfying than just generating reams of horrible spaghetti code. This does nothing to block a determined attacker, but it does increase the likelihood that J Random Cracker will wander off and work on something easier instead.

but they can all be worked around and or figured out by code analysists given the right time frame.

If you give people a program that they are able to run, then they will also be able to reverse-engineer it given enough time. That is the nature of programs. As soon as the binary is available to someone who wants to decipher it, you cannot prevent eventual reverse-engineering. After all, the computer has to be able to decipher it in order to run it, and a human is simply a slower computer.