Vista DEP will NOT go away

[Tomed2k]

I've taken every measure to disable Vista's Data Execution Prevention from shutting down an application that I am being forced to use (it's called GameGuard, used in some Asian MMO's for anti-hacking).

I've tried disabling DEP through the Vista GUI by adding exceptions and I've tried disabling through the command prompt bcdedit. When I go to the DEP menu in Vista it's all greyed out now which supposedly would be signifying the inactivity of DEP. To no avail, however, as GameGuard continues to be forcefully terminated by Vista while showing a DEP notice.

Has anyone figured out how to get rid of this Vista feature?

Also, some pictures for proof:

[cluberti]

I would suggest enabling and logging on with the actual administrator account, and see if that box is actually greyed out. It would seem your bcdedit didn't actually disable DEP for some reason.

[nadav]

You can also try disabling DEP in the BIOS. It's called different names by board manufacturers, but usually it's there.

[Innocent Devil]

try disabling PAE too

 bcdedit /set {current} pae ForceDisable

[Mr Snrub]

You seem to be running the 64-bit version from the info under your username...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...p/depcnfxp.mspx

Note: Hardware-enabled DEP is enabled by default on computers with DEP compatible processors that run Microsoft Windows XP 64-Bit Edition. 64-bit applications will not run from "non-executable" areas of memory. Hardware-enabled DEP cannot be disabled.

...

You cannot disable hardware DEP or exempt 64-bit applications running on 64-bit Windows XP systems with DEP compatible processors.

(Article talks about XP because it was written in 2004, no reason to assume it's not still accurate unless there is something to contradict that.)

So you've disabled software DEP but hardware NX/XD is still kicking in and terminating that badly-behaving process.

PAE is a pre-requisite for DEP, but also for the CPU to operate in 64-bit mode I believe.

nadav might be right in that the NX/XD feature can be disabled in the BIOS, I'm not sure.

(Personally I just trash any software that is not written to work with DEP - it is becoming more "the norm", in W2K8 it is enabled for ALL processes now.)