Portmaster Incompatible

[SuperTRev]

Hello there, I've sent two support tickets and no reply.

I have the third party firewall program 'Portmaster'. I like it. It was working fine until recently. Whenever I run it I have no internet, and my apps can't connect either.
Their devs think there is a compatibility issue. I've narrowed it down and think it's Spybot S&D or the AntiBeacon+.

I have tried many things to fix it, and nothing has worked as of yet.
So are you aware of any compatibility issues with third party firewalls, and if so, what can be done about it?

[Zenobia]

Hi there. I'm not ignoring you, I just don't know the answer to your question. I searched and couldn't find anything on compatibility issues with Portmaster and Spybot. I think sometimes it takes a while to get a reply from Spybot support. Had you heard anything back yet? How long has it been since you opened your tickets?

[SuperTRev]

Hi there. I'm not ignoring you, I just don't know the answer to your question. I searched and couldn't find anything on compatibility issues with Portmaster and Spybot. I think sometimes it takes a while to get a reply from Spybot support. Had you heard anything back yet? How long has it been since you opened your tickets?

My first ticket is about a week old, the second one a few days.
The Portmaster devs have the attitude of, "spybot sucks, just uninstall it. Our program works with most antivirus, so you are the problem." (yes that's what they told me, that I'm the problem, not their software) That's not a legitimate answer imo.
I've uninstalled it for the time being, so I can have internet access. But would really like for these two programs to not break each other.

[Zenobia]

Okay, thanks.
I'd say a week for a reply might be usual. That's a bit of a wild guess on my part, but I imagine that might be standard if there are a lot of support questions. And there are some holidays coming up. I do remember seeing some members of Team Spybot saying they don't work weekends when they made posts on the forums in the past. So perhaps you might hear something in a few days, maybe after Monday. If not, and there are no replies here, please could you post back here, I could ask tashi about it. She's always very helpful.

[SuperTRev]

Okay, thanks.
I'd say a week for a reply might be usual. That's a bit of a wild guess on my part, but I imagine that might be standard if there are a lot of support questions. And there are some holidays coming up. I do remember seeing some members of Team Spybot saying they don't work weekends when they made posts on the forums in the past. So perhaps you might hear something in a few days, maybe after Monday. If not, and there are no replies here, please could you post back here, I could ask tashi about it. She's always very helpful.

Ok. I can wait, but I get the feeling there won't be a solution. I don't see either companys' devs caring to fix an issue that few people have.
To add to AntiBeacon's generic immunization, Portmaster lets you surgically block anything you don't need communicating on your internet. Usually apps that have no business phoning home when you're not using them, etc.
But they don't have a feature that only blocks an app when it's not running. It's either block or don't block. I've requested it but they don't seem too concerned with that. So if this doesn't get fixed up with Spybot, I'll have to find another solution for a firewall.

[Zenobia]

How are things going with Portmaster and Spybot?

[(m/f)]

Hi, I installed Portmaster on a system that has been running Anti-Beacon for a while without any problems. When I restarted the system after installation, I was unable to connect to another machine via VPN. So I shut down Portmaster and was able to connect instantly. I tried to run Portmaster, but was not able to. Portmaster just gave a "service not running: please reinstall Portmaster" error message. It just came back after system restart. Then I could reproduce this error. I never adjusted anything in Portmaster itself, so my first impression was a big F for Portmaster.

[SuperTRev]

Hi, I installed Portmaster on a system that has been running Anti-Beacon for a while without any problems. When I restarted the system after installation, I was unable to connect to another machine via VPN. So I shut down Portmaster and was able to connect instantly. I tried to run Portmaster, but was not able to. Portmaster just gave a "service not running: please reinstall Portmaster" error message. It just came back after system restart. Then I could reproduce this error. I never adjusted anything in Portmaster itself, so my first impression was a big F for Portmaster.

Ya, for me currently the internet works without Portmaster, and doesn't work with Portmaster.
I didn't have the Spybot Pro license for a while. When I installed Portmaster, this was the time when I didn't have Spybot Pro, but still did have it installed.
So Portmaster was "first" for live monitoring of the internet stack. Then Spybot's live service was added after, then my problems started happening. The problems persist when disabling Spybot's live protection.
I also have Ccleaner, and it has a live monitor for cleaning, but I keep that disabled.

[SuperTRev]

It's been two weeks and still no reply on this.
When the support team got back to me with an email about another issue I asked about this too. Still nothing.

[SuperTRev]

I did get a reply a while ago that stated Spybot is not aware of any incompatibilities.
So I doubled down on my trial and error efforts.

It's interesting Spybot "isn't aware of an incompatibility" when I found that it's most definitely Spybot that's conflicting with Portmaster.
The only time I was able to gain my internet connection back while running Portmaster is when I ended those two Spybot tasks:

Scanner Service.png

But of course that is a serious problem because Spybot disables Windows Defender, so I can't keep it like that:

Windows Security.png

So now what am I supposed to do. I will tell their company about it, but I highly doubt they will be able to do anything about it.