Boycott Starforce

A page gathering information about why and how Starforce sux.

Talk about it

A forum is at your disposal for talking about Starforce and sharing your experiences. Talking about Starforce on an editor's or a publisher's forum as an impact of course, but if you don't want to be moderated, and see your message wasted, I suggest you to post your message on an independant place too, like your blog, or this forum.

Up to date games list

You can find an up to date list of games and their protection hosted by the DAEMON Tools guys.

How can I get rid of Starforce?

Official Starforce removal tool

There is a Starforce Cleaner Utility that has worked for some. As you can read on the page providing it as a download:

"The famous protection solution developer, Starforce, has granted a sole right to distribute the Starforce Removal Tool utility to www.onlinesecurity-on.com."

Well, in case their website goes down or their file is removed in the future, I'm providing a mirror of the Starforce removal tool. For your information, the domain onlinesecurity-on.com is owned by webmaster@star-force.com, enough said.

The only purpose of this file is to remove the Starforce driver from your system in the hope to get it back to the state it was before the Starforce installation. It won't allow you to play Starforce restricted games. We'll add to this page any new techniques available.

StarForce 3 Reverse-Engineering Tools (c) RELOADED

In March 2006, RELOADED, a well known warez group, released a set of tools including technical documentation and development files with the will to help people working on ways to bypass Starforce. There is nothing illegal in it, so feel free to download and spread this small rld-sfrt.rar file (595kB).

Unofficial way to remove Starforce

1. Remove these files:

   %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\sfsync03.sys
   %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\sfhlp02.sys
   %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\sfdrv01.sys
   

2. Remove these registry keys:

   HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sfsync03
   HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sfhlp02
   HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sfdrv01
   

Epos's method to achieve that

1. Device removal

• Go into the device manager and show non-plug and play devices. There will be three Starfoce items.
• Select the first one and Uninstall -> Are you sure -> YES -> Do you wish to restart -> No.
• Select the second one and Uninstall -> Are you sure -> YES -> Do you wish to restart -> No.
• Select the third (final) one and Uninstall -> Are you sure -> YES -> Do you wish to restart -> YES.
• *computer restarts*

2. File removal

open the search window (F3) and look for any of the following files on ANY drive:

sfsync*.sys
sfhlp*.sys
sfdrv*.sys

When you find any of them, remove them.

3. Registry cleanup

Open the windows registry (Start -> Run -> Regedit) and look for any of the following items:

sfsync
sfhlp
sfdrv

If you aren't allowed to delete those entries, right-slick on the item, click permissions, then grant full control over the item. You can then delete ir from the registry.

Again, remove anything even related to any of these items. Be sure to search for KEYS, VALUES and DATA. You will get more hits then just the ones given by the Starforce crew. I removed all trace of them.