Great idea, Grumpy
I have never bought any Starforce protected game before, and i never will. I have encountered several issues with Starforce protected demo's: after installing such a game demo, my system became unstable... i randomly got Blue Screens Of Death. I uninstalled the SF drivers, and hey, all of a sudden no more BSOD's !
However, almost no protection is 100% "clean": Safedisc, Securom, Tages, VOB ProtectCD and most other commercial copy protections do install 'hidden' drivers:
- Secdrv is a driver installed by Safedisc
- UAService7.exe is a service installed by Securom 7 (i do not know if this protection installs a driver)
- Enodpl/Tandpl/Lemgst/Hwpsgt are drivers installed by Tages
- SshDrvXX (where XX is a number) is a driver installed by ProtectCD
As you can see, almost all protections install "something" without your knowledge. But there is one big difference: the drivers installed by the protections apart from Starforce seem to be totally harmless. For example, I have never ever heard problems that were directly related to the Safedisc driver.
The Starforce drivers are getting worse each time they are being updated: the latest versions even prevent you from properly reading DPM info from CD/DVD media, which is, in my opinion, a real shame, and illegal !
The SF coders surely know of the current USB drive trick. What will be next ? That the new drivers will prevent you from using a USB CD/DVD drive ? I hope not.