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Starforce copy protection remove tool dont work

Revised: January 31, 2006

I like many people out there like to have a fast computer, I have gone out of my way to own a fast computer, custom choosing components that provide me with the best power to cost ratio available for my budget. As such my computer is pretty fast, its not the best out there, but it can beat most other brand new computers and thats what I like. I’m someone who runs 30 programs at once working with 100 or more tabs in Firefox and who likes to have photoshop running in the background – I am also very impatient as far as computer load times are concerned and thus I have the minimum services running on my computer, simply only the need to run ones, all the others are just baggage and I don’t utilize their functions anyway so there is no point in them sitting there taking up processor cycles and memory.

I am also very tight on security on my computer, I have a quarantine machine that I test most software on before running it on my computer because my computer is very, very important to me and I don’t want the extra problem of having to reinstall windows every so often because of extra crap that programs install on my computer without my consent. I thought I was safe, I only have the following installed:

• photoshop (uni work and hobby)
• word & excel 2003 (I don’t need the others i don’t use them)
• Visual C++ (I like to port old BASIC games to C++ so they will run on a x64 platform)
• Firefox (I dont like IE’s lack of support and security plus pngs look like shit in ie)
• winrar (my choice of unzipping app)
• winamp (i may be uninstalling this soon :|)
• intervideo windvd 7 (general dvd playing and because videolan isn’t as feature packed)
• videolan (for playing all those codexes that nothing else will for free)
• dameon tools (i like to copy my game disks to hdd and mount them makes for faster load times in my opinion, also usefull for checking linux boot disk iso’s)
• mirc (I dont really use this anymore, did once upon a time when i was heavily saturated in deviantart, but #alt.uk became crap so I left)
• macromedia dreamweaver (I have one of the free versions macromedia gave out on magazine, although its being uninstalled because I don’t really use it. I’m an old school coder and like to use notepad :p)
• Cinema 4D (I like to play around with 3D modeling and this appears to be the best way to do so, if you want to get into 3D stuff I recommend you buy a copy of cinema 4D and get started, its pretty easy to use)
• NVidia Mixer Application (it works in x64 which is good and controls the soundcard better than windows does so that is why i keep this necessary piece of extra baggage)
• Avast! AtiVirus (I run their free home edition of their anti virus application, it acts as a live firewall blocking malicious requests and such like as well as live anti virus scanning new files and programs as I open them, I should really shut down its email scanner because I don’t use any email software on my computer)
• Skype & MSN Messenger 7 (Got to keep in touch)
• Finally Interactual (it came with intervideo windvd, I installed it at my request, although I havent any use for it so I guess I shall uninstall it pretty soon)

So as you can see, unlike many computers mine is pretty clean with only 15 applications that I have installed (the rest being bundled with xp) and some of those are being uninstalled soon.

My problem is that Starforce copy protection has been installed on my computer against my will, and is actively fucking with my cd rom, thus the following drive errors that have been stopping my cd burns (a guy has to backup his photos and stuff) costing me money with broken disks, and because I’m on a 64bit OS its messing with the 32Bit emulator build into windows64 called syswow64 due to windows not liking what it is doing.
Starforce copy protection is seen my myself and many many others as malware (a lot like the sony rootkit). It is a piece of unnecessary crap that should never be installed on mine or anyone else’s computer. It poses a problem on two main levels:

• under Windows XP, if packets are lost during the reading or writing of a disk, XP interprets this as an error and steps the IDE speed down. Eventually it will revert to 16bit compatibility mode rendering a CD/DVD writer virtually unusable. In some circumstances certain drives cannot cope with this mode and it results in physical hardware failure (Most commonly in multi format CD/DVD writer drives). A sure sign of this step down occurring is that the burn speeds will get slower and slower (no matter what speed you select to burn at). Starforce, on a regular basis, triggers this silent step down. Until it reaches the latter stages most people do not even realise it is happening.
• The Starforce drivers, installed on your system, grant ring 0 (system level) privileges to any code under the ring 3 (user level) privileges. Thus, any virus or trojan can get OS privileges and totally control your system. Since Windows 2000, the Windows line security and stability got enhanced by separating those privileges, but with the Starforce drivers, the old system holes and instabilities are back and any program (or virus) can reach the core of your system by using the Starforce drivers as a backdoor.
  

I have noticed both things happening (see image above) these errors began to pop up around the time (checked my logs) that I installed the game X2 which stealthily installs the Starforce “malware”. I have also noticed more cd’s as coasters while before installing the game I had 0 bad burns, or burns that just stopped for no reason. I have also noticed (and this is a nice feature of XP64) that security errors have been showing up relating to a 32Bit processor stating bad driver or incompatibility issues, I have traced this to these starforce drivers (which took a while because I had to learn how).

So before today I was sure my computer has safe and secure with everything running as best as I could get it to, and then I find out about this, now I want to get rid of it, because it is “damaging” my computer and costing me money with respect to toasted cds. Below you can see the processes in windows device manager, however normally they are hidden. To show them you have to open device manager go to the view drop down and select show hidden devices. If the malware has been installed you should see the following:

Not one but four starforce devices! They are un-needed junk, that is basically slowing down your computers cdrom drive amongst other things, they need to be removed! They should never have been installed in the first place, and thats what bugs me the most is that I wasn’t warned – and also they are incompatible with my system which is causing ever more problems than they do under a 32bit OS.

Well ok, before I attempt to brute force remove them, I have researched a lot into the matter, I quote slashdot “some users report difficulty in keeping their systems stable due to conflicts, and think they’ve tracked it down to the StarForce protection.” and Broadbandreports “Users report that the software gobbles up computing cycles, slows CD drive read-times, creates CD-R read errors even after removal, and is responsible for a number of device conflicts – particularly with external USB drives. Users who have tried to remove the product manually have often damaged their systems to the point of needing a fresh OS install.“

So its not just me who is finding problems traced back to this malware, reading those I can also ditto the usb driver issue, I plugged a friends pen drive into my computer windows installed the drivers automatically and then just rebooted, upon start up I got the error report, windows had a system critical error due to device drivers, and it wasn’t the pen drive, it was these bloody Starforce protection thing, just back then I didn’t know about them, but looking back on error logs and id codes I can trace the problem to starforce. I have run windows 32Bit solidly for days on end really hammering it and have only ever had to reboot once because of memory leaks, my x64 version of windows xp has never in the 5 months I’ve been running it ever crashed, explorer has had to reboot a few times but never resulting in data loss (explorer rebooting meaning that explorer.exe crashes, windows closes explorer and then starts it again all other apps running remain running with no problem so i usually browse the net while waiting for the startbar to come back).

Ok, so I have checked the stories, found out the problem of many errors shown on my computer, traced error reports and finally found out why thanks to boycott starforce as well as how to remove. So I shall now go about the process and shall report back asap.

Edit: Well that was quick, I just downloaded the Starforce Cleaner Utility from online security and it took less than a second before asking me to reboot :/ And guess what, yup it did jack shit. Bugger all, fucking nothing! So yes, after all of this the remove tool doesn’t work, the only thing I can think of doing now is reinstalling windows. Thankyou a lot starforce, now I have to spend hours backing up my files just to fix a problem YOU CREATED!

Disclaimer: All the games I own have been bought, fortunately the only games I play now are UT2k3, Sim City and Guildwars. All software is either from magazines or bought. I am not endorsing piracy simply standing up for my right to protect my investments.

I wrote a follow up which can be seen here.

Tagged: angry, computer, copy, game, protection, rootkit, security, sony, starforce, windows.

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