short: yes, isolated machine. It's aggressive alright. It keeps track of anything running on your pc and get's really excited when some kinds of injections happen. It doesn't really help either, but it might help some. It might also send information about unknown or risky software and track your computer in order to try and block stuff you could use to affect your game. They don't really speak about what it does though. I doubt it's a backdoor'd piece of spy software but if you're the paranoid type (of you have a reason you need to be) I'd stay away from it. Then again, if you're that type, why are you in Windows? If you can defend that and paranoia (please send us the text, otherwise write "How I learned to stop worrying and love insecurity") boot into your "non-serious" install that doesn't use encrypted disks and whatnot. 2011/12/22 Michael Nelson <nelson_mikel@yahoo.com>

Maybe this is old hat, but sorry, I'm not up on game stuff. My son was installing a game for me (after saving the world using crypto during the day, I like to own b*tch*s for about 30 min a night just to wind down...) and the game required us to install PunkBuster. I demurred and did a quick search. It seems that punkbuster is rather aggressive and there are claims that it will upload a txt file to their server, if it looks to be of interest. I was horrified, naturally.

My son's pc gets regularly infested and restored from a partition image, and he does not keep any sensitive information on it, so pb is fine for him. But I have to be a little more circumspect.

Anyone know about pb? All I know is that it is pretty standard, but not actually owned by any big game producer. If there's a question mark over it, then I'll have to put the game on an isolated machine.

Mike N