I wonder why it is that a company would market something as "protection" that digs its way so deep into the OS that it can actually completely disable a computer. The other day, a friend of mine asked me to try out a game he had been playing called Blitzkrieg II. It looked like a decent game and figured it should easily install on Windows 7 as everything else I have tried has worked without a single problem. Well it certainly appeared to install with no issue. However, upon trying to run the game for the first time, this Starforce Protection software pops up in the middle and because the protection software itself is incompatible with Windows 7, it had an error and would not properly run. So the natural inclination from myself is to uninstall this piece of shit which I did with the quickness. I also looked up Starforce to see what it was and come to find many many search hits all saying how problematic this software is and even links to uninstall utilities. Oh shit this is not looking good. Well I looked to see if I could find any remnants of Starforce on the computer and nothing showed so I figured all should be well.
That was not the case though, but it took almost a week to find out. See I hardly ever turn off the computer and I so happened to need to reboot for a virus scanner upgrade so upon rebooting, Windows 7 went into a Startup Repair Loop of trying to fix a startup error which stemmed from a corrupt file, sfhelp02.sys. A quick Google search turns up the culprit, Starforce. Well shit this program didn't ever work and still fucked up my computer. Not cool. Well I seemed to be helpless in getting into Windows in anyway shape or form, not even SafeMode would work, so here is what I had to do.
Run a Knoppix Live CD, mount the hard drive where the offending files were, and then find them under the Windows/System32/drivers folder. sfhlp02.sys, sfdrv01.sys, and sfsync02.sys DELETE ALL three files.
With the offending files removed, I was able to restart Windows 7 again without any further problems.
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