Portmaster Incompatible

[(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.

[SuperTRev]

Portmaster is incompatible with Spybot. Is there an answer to this or what?

[(m/f)]

As I stated earlier in this thread, on my test system it sems that Portmaster seems to be the problem. We did not get anything official from Portmaster yet, so the best ad-hoc solution is to run only one of both programs. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

[SuperTRev]

Ok, well I've been telling them they are the problem. So they kicked me off their Discord instead of deal with the problem.
They kept telling me to uninstall Spybot. They want me to shuffle around my established tools to accommodate their half assed firewall program. Ya I don't think so.
So I'll be using a different firewall solution, thanks anyway.