The problem with snoopfree

http://www.snoopfree.com/default.htm is not unknown to this forum I believe.
Are any of you using it long term?

I'm very concerned because it seems to be loading up its drivers very very very early and i believe this might occasionally be causing BSODs, on my otherwise rocksolid system.

Using http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/LoadOrder.html i can see on my system that it's starting before everything, including the hardware/system drivers. Every other driver starts a lot later.

Also is there a way to temporaily disable snoopfree? It seems that it runs both a service and an exe, and they self protect one another. The autostart entry for example will replace itself if you remove it.

And you can't stop the snoopfree service.

 

Hi deviladvocate,

Using it since 2nd week in July this year. Have noticed that the UI isn't always first to populate the sytem tray vs. other hooked app service monitors.

Why would you want to temporarily disable snoopfree?

I too have an otherwise rocksolid system, not very many if any BSOD events that would occur on bootup though - is that when you get your BSODs you attribute to snoopfree? Most BSODs I have seen appear to have been one time events that have not repeated. I assume this is because the system state may get into an unstable situation for whatever reason and it bogarts by default or to protect itself from a compromise.

It does seem to have a self-protectiveness about it - but, I suppose that may be to avert keyloggers from getting a foothold earlier in the boot process as would the early load time.

-- Tom

 

The UI says nothing about the driver, as you know.

To eliminate the possibility of errors, to simplify matters when carrying out senstivie operations for one.

The instability isn't something obvious, isn't repeatable etc, but just because snoopfree drivers start up okay doesn't mean that it isn't the culprit later.

In fact , call it a hunch, but I'm pretty sure it's snoopfree. I am uninstalling for a while to see..

I don't know it strikes me as obsessive, even processguard, antiviruses don't protect themselves like that. It strikes me as more like malware in this area.

It's typical of the programmer i guess, considering that he made sure his drivers load up first ahead of everything. I'm pretty sure this isn't good practice.

 

I'm not sure it isn't within the ballpark of allowable good practice given the objective of snoopfree being to defeat a keylogger - loading as early as possible without interfering with anything else gives it a better chance of catching the keylogger - provided it covers all of the ways a keylogger would intercept your keystrokes. I don't know that it can catch a hardware keylogger.

-- Tom