Rating and comments for Winpooch

The purpose of this application is admirable, its stability is not, and though one would want an Open Source Anti-Spyware application, this has a way to go before it can compete with such things as Spybot, Ad-Aware, and other high-end commercial applications.

BSoD galore on 0.6.3! Beware!

It was horrible. I put it on my system and it just crashed.
Don install such thing.

The software is definitely unstable, and is also quite resource intensive. It does offer some great features (such as the ability to control service access to the internet and the ability to protect the registry), however the instability of the software overshadows it's functionality. Having said that, I would still recommend that users keep an eye on the Winpooch project, as the software has a great deal of potential.

I have to dido the comments made here. I wish I would have read this before installing. The application's news version (0.66.0) fixed the issue with blue screening the PC, but it's so resource intensive that it brought my PC down to a crawl. Took me almost 30 mins to boot up after installing, thing was SO SLOW with scanning applications that where opening. It gives you the option to accept/refect applications that are opening that it thinks may be infected giving you 30-40 seconds to make the decision before it automatically rejects the app. Unfortunatly, my PC was so sluggish it too me more than that to move the cursor over to select accept.

Eventually got the PC booted up and uninstalled the app. I think part of the problem is the scanner portion/hooks.

A great program with unfortunate default settings and virtually no docs.

DO NOT just install & reboot!

Disable the virus scanning **immediately** after you install and only put it back on once you've done a full system scan with Clam (or whatever you're using). This will give you a fighting chance of training the access requests without being bombarded by virus hits for every file in your system.

Once you get winpooch trained, it's really a great piece of software. You just need to set aside some time to get over that initial hump.

I also found that winpooch is a resource hog, the winpooch logo pops up everytime I boot and the system is unresponsive for about 15 minutes. After that everything seems to be fine, but having to wait 15 minutes everytime I boot is unacceptable.

Great piece of software, although not without flaws. First of all: default settings just suck, causing all problems mentioned above - unresponsiveness, painfully long booting, unacceptably high resource usage... Watchdog/firewall apps should be paranoid, but Winpooch is WAY too paranoid when started for the first time. Solution for this is imple - either you take some time to adjust its behaviour from scratch, or (easier) look for already tweaked rules file on the net to start with and point Winpooch`s paranoia in the right direction.
Another two things annoying about Winpooch are:
- no DNS support: the program operates on and reports connections to/from IP addresses only, which is sufficient, but awkward for everyday use. It would be nice if the user could see the domain name (if existing) of the IP some program tries to connect to.
- vague antivirus dialog: it pops up saying that some file is infected, but not telling what virus it is and giving choice of "Accept", "Deny" and "Feign", which doesn`t tell much - Accept what? Deleting file? Letting the virus be? I`d rather like to see a button named "Scan this file" (with normal AV scanner).
That said, Winpooch has been protecting my PC for quite a long time, and I`m pleased with its performance. It may be a little rough for the user, but it`s much more than an ordinary firewall, monitoring operations on files in selected directories and protecting the Windows registry from being altered without user`s knowledge. This makes me forgive its (few) flaws easily.

Does anybody use Winpooch on XP/SP3 ?
For me it's impossible but very good in XP/SP2 : driver not loaded.
Plus : it's a little bit dangerous to modify default configuration rules...