Nvidia ForceWare Network Access Manager
 

Has anyone had any experience with getting rid of this? Apparently it is a Nvidia firewall that I never realized that I had until I downloaded and installed WinPatrol Free. It's running as a service. I've read that it can create all kinds of problems. I've also read that getting rid of it can be quite the chore.

Any assistance or experience appreciated.

I would try to Google for a utility for complete removal. Had no idea that Nvidia even had a firewall. Have you gone to Nvidia's website? I just updated Nvidia video drivers as well. Seems I will look into this also.

Cheers
Wdhpr

As best I can tell, it installs when you update video drivers. I have no idea when/how I installed this crazy thing.... I've done a brief Google search and have found lots of people having troubles with this.

P.S. Thank goodness for WinPatrol Free. I just decided to take a look at starting programs and services running and found numerous things running that I had no idea where there. One is from Acronis True Image, one is from Norton Partition Magic, there's even one from my NITRO PDF program. I'm going to tackle them one at a time.

P.S.S. I'm wondering if the Nvidia firewall (there's more than the one questionable service from Nvidia) was giving me the issues that I had with Avast?

NOTE: I would encourage anyone running Nvidia video cards to check if they have the "ForceWare Network Access Manager" service running. You might want to do some research about it.

Starting back in 2004 Nvidia has had this on-chip firewall (part hardware -- part software) implemented on certain of their motherboards. (most of the nforce3-nforce4 MoBo's) So it has been around for quite some time. The last mother board I had, came with it, but someone warned me about the troubles it could cause and I avoided installing the drivers for it.

The technology is called ActiveArmor and that should help in a search to discover how to get rid of the drivers. This article here might help as well if you have a Force4 MoBo.

Ritho, forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what chipset I have or MoBo. I do know that I have a Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS 512 MB.

The best website that I've been able to find detailing how to uninstall this thing is:

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...ccfdec52028db3

Apparently Nvidea has included the on-chip firewall in more MoBo's that just the ones I mentioned. What is weird though is that I can't find any mention of it in other MoBo's. In fact I found several references to it having been discontinued since the nf4's. So I don't see how you could even have it. It might be worth starting a thread over at the nvidea forums and asking what's going on with that.

Edit: On second thought, don't go to their forum. You would be laughed right out of there. See my post below.

Man am I feeling stupid. :o You said Geforce 8800. That is not a MoBo it is your GPU. So you probably do have a Nforce3 or 4 Mobo.

After googling "bios settings nvidia firewall" I found that at least some mother boards came with an option to enable or disable the hardware part from the bios. It might be worth checking.