doppelganger101

That's completely your choice. Personally, I love StripMyRights because it's completely transparent. If you didn't tell someone that it was on their computer, they probably wouldn't notice it was there. I find it provides usable security when I'm logged in as an administrator.

Most of the time, even running programs with StripMyRights or from within a limited user account isn't even necessary. As long as you practice good Internet security practices, you'll likely never get a virus.

There's a very useful utility that was written for Windows XP in order to provide a balance of security and usability so that it is not necessary to log in to a limited user account in order to provide extra security. It's called StripMyRights; it's basically an improvement on MSDN's DropMyRights. The purpose of the program is to allow a person logged in under an administrative account to run processes with limited user privileges. However, DropMyRights had some flaws. The worst flaw was that it did not allow command-line switches to be passed to the process in question. It also flashed a command prompt on the screen for a split second. This was merely an aesthetic bug, but it clearly bothered someone enough to make them write StripMyRights. StripMyRights basically does the same thing as DropMyRights, but it allows command-line switches to be passed to processes and it does away with the command prompt. It's completely transparent to the user once it's set up and allows vulnerable processes such as Internet Explorer and other Internet-facing processes to be run with limited user privileges while logged in as an administrator. Documentation for StripMyRights can be found here: http://www.sysint.no/nedlasting/StripMyRights.htm StripMyRights can be downloaded here: http://www.download.com/StripMyRights/3000...4-10486002.html Enjoy!

When scanning my second largest partition on my second hard disk (90 GB), I get a "Bad Allocation" error at the end. If I attempt to scan it again, it will instantly give me a "Bad Allocation" error again unless I restart Recuva. After I restart it, it simply gives me the "Bad Allocation" error at the end of the scan again. Here is the log file from that scan: BEGINNING OF LOG FILE #1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [2008-07-14 22:01:50] [iNFO ] Recuva v1.16.333 [2008-07-14 22:01:50] [iNFO ] System Info: MS Windows XP SP3, Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6850 @ 3.00GHz, 2.0GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS [2008-07-14 22:01:50] [iNFO ] No update available [2008-07-14 22:01:58] [iNFO ] Boot sector: 61KQTlRGUyAgICAAAggAAAAAAAAA+AAAPwD/AD8AAAAAAAAAgACAAGUPQAsAAAAAAAAMAAAAAAD2 ALQAAAAAAPYAAAABAAAApc1eyABfyCYAAAAA+jPAjtC8AHz7uMAHjtjoFgC4AA2OwDPbxgYOABDo UwBoAA1oagLLihYkALQIzRNzBbn//4rxZg+2xkBmD7bRgOI/9+KGzcDtBkFmD7fJZvfhZqMgAMO0 QbuqVYoWJADNE3IPgftVqnUJ9sEBdAT+BhQAw2ZgHgZmoRAAZgMGHABmOwYgAA+COgAeZmoAZlAG U2ZoEAABAIA+FAAAD4UMAOiz/4A+FAAAD4RhALRCihYkABYfi/TNE2ZYWwdmWGZYH+stZjPSZg+3 DhgAZvfx/sKKymaL0GbB6hD3NhoAhtaKFiQAiujA5AYKzLgBAs0TD4IZAIzABSAAjsBm/wYQAP8O DgAPhW//Bx9mYcOg+AHoCQCg+wHoAwD76/60AYvwrDwAdAm0DrsHAM0Q6/LDDQpBIGRpc2sgcmVh ZCBlcnJvciBvY2N1cnJlZAANCk5UTERSIGlzIG1pc3NpbmcADQpOVExEUiBpcyBjb21wcmVzc2Vk AA0KUHJlc3MgQ3RybCtBbHQrRGVsIHRvIHJlc3RhcnQNCgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg6CzyQAAVao= [2008-07-14 22:01:58] [iNFO ] Reading MFT [2008-07-14 22:01:58] [iNFO ] Reading files [2008-07-14 22:03:55] [iNFO ] Building folders [2008-07-14 22:03:57] [iNFO ] Restoring tree [2008-07-14 22:04:20] [iNFO ] Analyzing damage [2008-07-14 22:05:03] [ERROR] bad allocation [2008-07-14 22:05:48] [iNFO ] Boot sector: 61KQTlRGUyAgICAAAggAAAAAAAAA+AAAPwD/AD8AAAAAAAAAgACAAGBJAhQAAAAAAAAMAAAAAACW JEABAAAAAPYAAAABAAAAqRppqC9pqEoAAAAA+jPAjtC8AHz7uMAHjtjoFgC4AA2OwDPbxgYOABDo UwBoAA1oagLLihYkALQIzRNzBbn//4rxZg+2xkBmD7bRgOI/9+KGzcDtBkFmD7fJZvfhZqMgAMO0 QbuqVYoWJADNE3IPgftVqnUJ9sEBdAT+BhQAw2ZgHgZmoRAAZgMGHABmOwYgAA+COgAeZmoAZlAG U2ZoEAABAIA+FAAAD4UMAOiz/4A+FAAAD4RhALRCihYkABYfi/TNE2ZYWwdmWGZYH+stZjPSZg+3 DhgAZvfx/sKKymaL0GbB6hD3NhoAhtaKFiQAiujA5AYKzLgBAs0TD4IZAIzABSAAjsBm/wYQAP8O DgAPhW//Bx9mYcOg+AHoCQCg+wHoAwD76/60AYvwrDwAdAm0DrsHAM0Q6/LDDQpBIGRpc2sgcmVh ZCBlcnJvciBvY2N1cnJlZAANCk5UTERSIGlzIG1pc3NpbmcADQpOVExEUiBpcyBjb21wcmVzc2Vk AA0KUHJlc3MgQ3RybCtBbHQrRGVsIHRvIHJlc3RhcnQNCgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg6CzyQAAVao= [2008-07-14 22:05:48] [iNFO ] Reading MFT [2008-07-14 22:05:48] [ERROR] bad allocation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- END OF LOG FILE#1 When scanning my largest partition on my second hard disk (160 GB), Recuva crashes after getting partially through the scan. The log file from this scan was enormous; it was almost 40 megabytes. 99% of that log file was simply "Unknown Error" repeated over and over until the end of the file. Here is the beginning of the log file: BEGINNING OF LOG FILE #2 (partial) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [2008-07-14 22:05:59] [iNFO ] Recuva v1.16.333 [2008-07-14 22:05:59] [iNFO ] System Info: MS Windows XP SP3, Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6850 @ 3.00GHz, 2.0GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS [2008-07-14 22:06:01] [iNFO ] No update available [2008-07-14 22:06:05] [iNFO ] Boot sector: 61KQTlRGUyAgICAAAggAAAAAAAAA+AAAPwD/AD8AAAAAAAAAgACAAGBJAhQAAAAAAAAMAAAAAACW JEABAAAAAPYAAAABAAAAqRppqC9pqEoAAAAA+jPAjtC8AHz7uMAHjtjoFgC4AA2OwDPbxgYOABDo UwBoAA1oagLLihYkALQIzRNzBbn//4rxZg+2xkBmD7bRgOI/9+KGzcDtBkFmD7fJZvfhZqMgAMO0 QbuqVYoWJADNE3IPgftVqnUJ9sEBdAT+BhQAw2ZgHgZmoRAAZgMGHABmOwYgAA+COgAeZmoAZlAG U2ZoEAABAIA+FAAAD4UMAOiz/4A+FAAAD4RhALRCihYkABYfi/TNE2ZYWwdmWGZYH+stZjPSZg+3 DhgAZvfx/sKKymaL0GbB6hD3NhoAhtaKFiQAiujA5AYKzLgBAs0TD4IZAIzABSAAjsBm/wYQAP8O DgAPhW//Bx9mYcOg+AHoCQCg+wHoAwD76/60AYvwrDwAdAm0DrsHAM0Q6/LDDQpBIGRpc2sgcmVh ZCBlcnJvciBvY2N1cnJlZAANCk5UTERSIGlzIG1pc3NpbmcADQpOVExEUiBpcyBjb21wcmVzc2Vk AA0KUHJlc3MgQ3RybCtBbHQrRGVsIHRvIHJlc3RhcnQNCgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg6CzyQAAVao= [2008-07-14 22:06:05] [iNFO ] Reading MFT [2008-07-14 22:06:05] [iNFO ] Reading files [2008-07-14 22:07:31] [ERROR] Unknown error ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- END OF LOG FILE #2 (partial) After that first "Unknown Error", there are probably millions of repeated "Unknown Error" statements until the end of the log file. Recuva only seems to choke on these two partitions; it is able to scan my other, smaller partitions without crashing or giving errors