To everyone concerns StarForce protection in cdfreaks forum:

I am working for one company manufacturing hardware devices for limited market. I decided to post about StarForce because some of our customers did complain about problems related to drivers installed by this copy protection. Our devices systematically failed when some StarForce protected application was running and some virtual drive application was present.

Our engineers investigated this issue and found that StarForce sends request to storage devices at high interrupt level (IRQL = 2) and completely freezes execution of all system threads and timers for times up to 3 seconds - they keep this IRQL and do not release it. All this is in multitasking OS!

Our device may get some important interrupts when StarForce protected application is running and it may require to do some processing after timer callback, but system is completely frozen and our device severely fails.

We understand that Windows is not real-time operating system but such behaviour of application in multitasking OS is not acceptable!.


Every device driver professional can read this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/resour...HN_083005.html


Here is quote from there:

DPCs and ISRs run at an elevated interrupt request level, or IRQL (DISPATCH_LEVEL and device IRQL, respectively.

A driver that spends too much time in its DPCs and ISRs prevents the system from servicing threads, which degrades overall system performance.


The Microsoft Windows Vista Logo Program requires that:
* An ISR does not run longer than 25 microseconds.
* DPC does not run longer than 100 microseconds.

StarForce driver holds system on DPC level for 3 seconds (3,000,000 microseconds)!

We do not know why they do such dirty tricks literally "raping" user's system - maybe they fight against some other software - but such operation methods are pure overkill. They definitely chose wrong platform for their protection:

except StarForce application there are many others running in Windows OS, seems they forget it!

We visited their offical home page (http://www.star-force.com/) and with big surprise found that "StarForce FrontLine Driver passed "CERTIFIED FOR MICROSOFT WINDOWS VISTA" tests. So our logical question is: who and how makes these tests? And how such nasty behaviour inside multitasking OS allows them to become "MICROSOFT CERTIFIED" and get Windows Vista Logos? We strongly doubt that people involved there are professionals (both those who write such bogus drives and those who test them).

Their forum is not existing, so I decided to post here and in some other forums to let community know what is happening in reality.



Regards,
Chengmin

Looks to me as if starforce made a little pay out to ms maybe?

I doubt it. I don't think Microsoft would back something that has such poor system stability given that Windows is such a diverse platform. Besides, they usually securom.