(Starforce) King Kong almost lost me my OS

[slow...@gmail.com]

Thank the gods or Google (or rather, search engines in general).

I bought a retail copy of King Kong and installed it on my Windows 8 64-bit (I use a Win 7 shell add-on).  After installation I got a message that Starforce Protection requires a restart.  I didn't think much of it and restarted.  Then got a shock as Windows wouldn't start: "automatic repair is starting...beginning diagnosis...awaiting repairs".  In my case (being in Germany) the first part of the message was in German: "automatische reparatur wird vorbereitet".

I powered off/on as nothing was happening, apart from this repairs message...I couldn't even start safe mode!  Surely a sign of a BIG problem.  In BIOS I saw that my boot order had changed, now in first place was something called RealTek PXE BO5 DOO, which I don't quite understand, so in BIOS I manually selected my hard drive again.

No change.

I waited about half an hour during this "awaiting repairs" then eventually got the message that "Windows couldn't repair the issue".  I had a few options (refresh/reset OS among them...as last resorts):

- safe mode again...didn't work
- command prompt to check disk: worringly it showed C: as only having about 100MB in total space (it has about 100GB).  It checked out as no errors!  I checked my second partition and that showed the correct size with some errors.  A repair ( via /f) was apparently "successful".  But a restart of the OS didn't change the problem.

So I then went for System Restore, and fortunately got a relatively recent date.  Now it starts again!  I lost quite a lot of work as the previous days I'd been installing programs (that now need re-installing) but at least I lost no data.

After a bit of googling I discovered that Starforce really is the culprit.  I just now wrote Starforce via their homepage contact form accusing them of malware-practices but got a "access denied" message after clicking "send", which leads me to think they have a keyword-scan script which blocks mails sent to them with certain keywords in them.


So yeah, thanks to those who've been contributing to this subject, and especially to those compiling the list of games affected (X3, ffs!).


Just wanted to put my experience out there in case it helps anyone.