Timing with SB's services

[SFOGuy]

Hi.

I'm not sure if this should be a feature request or a bug fix, it's almost a matter of opinion so please help me decide. I don't use Sandboxie on a daily basis, but only several times a week when I'm testing new software.

So to save some resources I've set the Sandboxie Service to start manually rather than automatically. This causes a minor problem: when I start a program from the context menu with "Run Sandboxed" I get the error:

The Sandboxie driver (SbieDrv) is not available to sandbox programs.
Make sure both the driver and Sandboxie Service (SbieSVC) have started successfully.

By the time I click the OK button, Sandboxie is running, the service is started and the icon is in the tray. So simply repeating the process and launching from the context menu a second time runs my program sandboxed with no more errors.

If there were a built-in delay, or better a retry/timeout mechanism that allowed the service to start up before Sandboxie concluded that it hadn't, the error might not appear and only one attempt would be needed to run the program sandboxed.

Sandboxie is not in the following category, but nowadays it seems every program wants three background processes and three services running, and they like to have them all start at boot-up. I guess it's easy to forget that we use our computers for things other than the program in question. So IMHO it's better programming practice to reduce the resource load on a computer where possible and courteously refrain from running programs when you don't need them.

Sorry for the rant, but if I'm going on about this too much, it's because every time I'm asked to fix someone's computer, I see startup items from Adobe, Quicktime, Realaudio, Symantec, HP, Yahoo, Google, Kodak, etc.,etc., plus the associated services, and the user uses many of the items only on occasion. It's a wonder he has any resources left.

Thanks,
Guy

[tzuk]

This seems to be a problem only on Vista, as far as I can tell, on XP the "start-on-demand" works as expect. Let me check what's wrong.

[tzuk]

I fixed this, so you should see it working as expected starting with the next release, which will be published as soon as I fix another couple of bugs.

[SFOGuy]

Thanks, Tzuk.

I'm using XP, so that's where I saw it. The on-demand works just fine, but only if the service is already started, which it normally is unless you get in and muck around with your plan like I did.

But it's a good thing to fix -- now I can point to Sandboxie as an example of how a program should be written to behave nicely.

Guy

[tzuk]

OK, great. It really has nothing to do with Vista per se, I saw it happen on Vista because it took longer there for Sandboxie to finish initializing. This longer initialization is new in Sandboxie 3, and it broke the old "demand-start" feature. Oh well, now it's fixed.

[SFOGuy]

I verified it several times by stopping the service and then using a context command to run various programs sandboxed. It's definitely fixed!

Thanks,
Guy