SSDP Discovery Service - Microsoft/Windows XP Home

There is a lot of description and controversy about this service on the net.
It apparently can cause trouble with system tray icon loading - missing icons that should be there - and various other irregularities.

Even Microsoft advocate setting to "disable" or alternatively "automatic".
Mine is set to "manual", which suggests I do something - I never have done, it may as well be disabled.

One article I found says this ;-

Used in conjunction with Universal Plug and Play Device Host, it detects and configures UPnP devices on your home network. For security reasons, disable this service. If any EXTERNAL device does not function because of this service being disabled, place it back in to Automatic. MSN Messenger uses this service in conjunction with supported UPnP devices, to provide support for networks behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) firewall, gateway or router. Also, if you are experiencing difficulty connecting to multi-player games that use DirectX(7,8,9), place this service to Automatic and ensure you download all security updates. The problem that I have found with this service is that it broadcasts UDP port 1900 "a lot." If you notice plenty of network activity even though nothing is happening, this service is sometimes the cause.

Another article says ;-
SP 52616: Disable the “SSDP Discovery Service” to improve system performance

Symptom: When you start the Services applet in “Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools”, the “Startup Type” setting for the “SSDP Discovery Service” may be set to “Automatic” or ”Manual”.
Resolution: Modify the system registry settings to disable the “SSDP Discovery Service” in Windows.
Additional Information: The “SSDP Discovery Service” service enables discovery of UPnP devices on your home network. If you are not using UPnP devices on your computer, disable the service.
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Is this service of any value at all ? Can it simply be disabled using Windows Computer Management without a catastrophe decending upon us ?
KAS

 

It is disabled on my systems and I have never missed it.

 

It can be.

A lot of devices are uPnP. What that basically means is that hardware can communicate with each other.
Lets say you have SSDP/uPnP enabled on your PC and you have a router that is also uPnP/enabled. Your PC will connect directly to the router, when this happens, you will see in the "Network connections"(on your PC) a "Gateway" will show. From then on, programs on your PC that use uPnP will be able to control the router, such programs as P2P use this control to actively open ports(Port forward). This can be good because there is no need for the user to go into the router setting and have to manually set up port forwarding. The possible downside is that if you where unfortunate to become infected, it is possible for malware to also take control of the router via this method and open ports.

You can go into windows services and simply disable the service. If you have no hardware on the LAN that requires this then there is actually no point in using it anyway.
I have always disabled this service on all my setups with no ill effect.


- Stem