Download WinPatrol 25.0.2012

BillP Studios has released version 25.0.2012 of WinPatrol. In this program, ‘Scotty, the Windows watchdog’ keeps an eye on the system, making it work faster and more stable. Scotty detects and stops attacks from spy, ad and malware, viruses and malicious Internet Explorer add-ons, while also preventing home page hijacks. A few other things are also monitored, including the processes running on the PC, the hosts file, and file extensions. In addition to the free version, there is also a paid one Plus variant, which provides access to a database with extensive information about programs and processes, which states, for example, whether they are safe or malicious. The release notes for this release can be found below.

Uninstall Detection
The new WinPatrol v25 will track programs that have been installed on your system and will monitor the location Windows uses to store Uninstall information. This location includes the path to the Uninstall command which is often used by malware to remove a program silently. WinPatrol will let you know the names of any programs which are removed. This feature is available to PLUS only users and is optional. Legitimate alerts may occur during software updates or when you choose to remove software.

Launch Program Removed Detection
All WinPatrol users can benefit from the often requested option of Start program removal. WinPatrol PLUS is not required to benefit from this feature. WinPatrol was the first program to let users know if a new auto startup programs were installed. Now WinPatrol will also let you know if another program has removed one of your Startup programs. One of the common behaviors of malware is to reduce the possibility of being detected by Anti-Virus or security software. It?s common for new malware to remove programs from your auto Startup list so it won’t be detected. Since WinPatrol is not as well known as other commercial products it’s rarely a target for removal.

Delayed Startup Programs
One of our more popular features is the ability to delay the launch of a Startup programs. This can really speed up your boot time. Our recent sale generated a lot of new WinPatrol users who helped isolate a few bugs in Delayed Start especially on the 64 bit versions of Windows. These bugs have been fixed so programs aren?t lost and parameters are properly returned when moving a Delayed program back to its original status.

Windows XP Kill Task
This bug only affected XP users and even reverting to our v18 code didn?t resolve a flaw preventing WinPatrol from killing tasks. It turns out Microsoft changed the value of one of the parameter masks used in a function called OpenProcess. The Kill Task function broke on XP after we updated to newer Microsoft tools in our efforts to better support Windows 7. Sorry to the XP folks that it took this long to find. I can’t thank Larry from Microsoft enough for his assistance. This is an important feature because unlike Task Manager, WinPatrol allows you to select multiple programs to kill with one click.

Company Name, Details and Correct Path
One of the first steps in detecting a suspicious programs is the lack of a company name in its resource. On Windows 64 bit machines not all of the details of programs were available due to a bug I found and reported to Microsoft. It turns out a common Windows function called ExpandEnvironmentStrings won?t always providing the correct path when represented by the environment variable %programfiles%. If you?re using Windows 64 bit you probably noticed there is a “C:\Program Files” path for 64 bit programs and older programs are stored in “C:\Program Files (x86)”. A correct path to your program is required to obtain details like a company name. We?ve worked around this bug so we can find the correct path which is required for company name and many other features.

Misc Fixes
Anyone who noticed Scotty’s ability to run on startup was sometimes missing will be pleased. There was in fact a bug that removed WinPatrol as a Startup program. It wasn’t caused by other programs, just programmer stupidity.

Remaining Bug
There’s a weird bug that some folks have experienced where Scotty just randomly barks for no reason. It’s been around for years and still remains. Usually reinstalling WinPatrol fixes the problem. If you experience this bug you can help us narrow down the reason for this barking by using a little known feature in WinPatrol. In the Windows Control Panel you’ll find an applet that allows you to customize sounds in programs which take advantage of this option. Near the end of the list of applications you’ll find WinPatrol and you can assign different sound files to the different kind of WinPatrol alerts. Instead of our barking sound you can assign any sound you have available on your system. This feature was created for our legally blind supporters. By assigning a different sound to our alert types you can help us narrow down the type of alert which is occurring when Scotty barks but doesn’t display a message.