as some have suggested, i volunteered as the labrat. well, not me in person (me is too old for sandboxes) but one of my PC here (a Dell PIII @ 800 MHz, 512 mb ram, 20 gB hard drive - not that it is much younger, but it didn't really have a choice :-). a clean, slim XP SP2 up-to-date installation (thanks be to the mighty powers of nLite and ghost!), some useless services enabled, the usual tweaking. installed software: open office 2.03 foxit reader photo filtre firefox 2.0 & opera 9.01 google earth frostwire, aMule and uTorrent miranda IM, skype and cspace deepburner free eac, fb2k, VLC and k-lite full the usual collection of free system tools oh yes ... and VTP 5.5 as an eye candy :-) so this system is reasonable fit to do the daily tasks. keep in mind that it has no protection except the on-board windows firewall ,,, and indeed the sandbox. and here is how the sandbox works. It's basically a tool that allows you to run various applications in an isolated fashion on your system, where they don't have direct access to the disk or the registry (they think they do, but they are being virtualized). you can open every application via sandbox. question is, does it make sense and will it work? miranda IM for starters does NOT work. google earth responded with a sandbox error, that the files written to the virtual hard drive are too big, which can be helped by manually editing the sandbox size. sandbox creates a virtual hard disk with the well known file structure where every file any program requires and modifies throughout its usage will be 'shadowed'. this virtual drive can be opened and all files are accessible (which is important, when you download a file via browser, p2p or torrent, these files must be copied manually then to a 'safe' location on your hard drive. so, there IS traffic between the virtual environment and the real world, but this is man-made! all sandboxes mut be cleared manually, so there is no 'accidental' loss of data (pretty much in the same way as you manually clear your cache, cookies, etc.). in case your browser caught some malware which might be still active in your memory the perp can do his evil work, create and alter files, but ONLY on the virtual hard drive. so after a night of extensive XXX surfing (it is not just the porn industry, the evil doers are everywhere out there) you are indeed very prone to phishing & co, you should NOT pull your credit card and do some online shopping or banking. instead, restart the computer and clear the sandbox. things, you should NOT do thru a sandbox: automatic updates and online malware scans. sandboxie installs a shell extension to sandbox any application by right click. the registered version ($20) also has the option to forcibly open a selection of programs thru sandboxie. someone said this rather sounds only be good for testing purposes, i don't think so. it is indeed VERY good for testing too as you can run a windows installer thru sandbox (just to test new applications of which you don't know the potential side-effects) and the program will be then installed only temporarily on your virtual drive. all this of course needs more space than the default 32 MB. sandbox, however, requires at least some awareness (and don't think that the best protection setup in the world will protect you if you're acting stupid! :-) and is causing minor inconveniences by the way it works (google earth takes a good while to load, as it is creating a massive swapfile, downloads need to be transferred manually, etc.) ... but that's nothing compared to embarrassing CN posts (help with IE :-), endless sessions with various spyware killers, resource hogging virus scans and the likes. last knight after a session with internet explorer (gosh, i have really forgotten how IE looks like, would you believe it? :-) i tried to clear the sandbox and it failed, because some files where still in use although all apps were closed, even a quick check with taskmgr didn't reveal anything suspicious, however, after a restart i was able to clear the sandbox. and everything was hunky-dory again. ppl who know me, know also that i'm not exactly a great fan of IE, but with sandbox i don't mind using ms' browser again. a word about e-mail: i'm only using webmail, but sandboxie supports outlook and OE. i don't know how this exactly works, as your mails and contact are saved in some dbx or pst files that you certainly do not want to loose when clearing a sandbox ... so here is a need for another volunteer. and now, if you want to know more, go on and download those bloody 240kB yourself, it's free :-) Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

but thats nothing compared to embarrassing CN posts. Bad form that one geezer.

my sincere apologies ... but most of these problems, usually posted in the worng forum too, could have been avoided with little awareness and precaution. Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

Where do you download it from?

From mattie's other post... http://www.sandboxie.com/ i_XpUser