Good programs/and or programs that would be essential to security?

Hi Comp01,

The way I look at these two tools is "they can't hurt". They are available free, and they can be enabled and disabled at will, so, why not use them?

The new HTAstop2003 does a good job at fully disabling HTA on your system. Now, certainly there is a question regarding whether or not this is necessary... Currently, there does not appear to be a real exploit in the wild that uses HTA, that doesn't first actually gain it's access to your system via ActiveX, but again, I believe it can't hurt to disable it especially if you aren't using it.

Here are a couple HTAstop related threads. (Note the statement in the first thread that says one or two Control Panel applets won't work if HTA is disabled on an XP system. However, if you need to use those, just re-enabled HTA.):

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=11988

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=13531

Here is some info on DSOstop:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=12016;start=msg77777#msg77777

These tools may very well not be needed, but, they do what they say they will do, they disable a specific capability within Windows - and they re-enabled it, if desired.