Firewall reports internet conn. attempts on any right click

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating Version 8.2; any time I right click a file, the firewall reports two attempts from dOpus for an internet connection on port 1666 before the context menu is displayed. What is trying to call home for what reason and how can it be switched off?

guidot

You don't have Perforce installed do you? It's shell extension will connect to the perforce depot (default port 1666) to see if you can check in/out files in that directory.

I doubt it's Opus doing this. You likely have a shell extension that is trying to contact the internet for some reason (which is odd and worth investigating).

Shell extensions are DLLs which run within the DOpus.exe (or Explorer.exe) process so when they run it looks like Opus is doing it.

If you turn on Preferences, Miscellaneous, Windows Integration, Hide Windows items on file context menus (shift overrides) then the connection attempts should stop. If that's the case then you've confirmed that it is a 3rd party shell extension rather than something built into Opus itself.

Tracking down which shell extension it is can be a pain, though. The stuff in this tip might help:

[Tip: Organise and Speed-Up Context Menus)

If you're familiar with editing the registry then you can find the GUIDs for some of the shell extensions and add them back to Opus one-by-one using the tip, but there are some handlers which aren't as easy to find. Worth a try, though.

It might also be worth running an anti-spyware tool to see if it detects anything on your machine. There could be a legitimate reason for a shell extension to connect to the internet (maybe it's doing an update check, although doing it every time someone uses their context menus is a bit silly) like this but it could also be spyware.

Good luck!

Thanks for leaving me a little bit dazzled: Yes, I have Perforce installed, but neither Explorer nor my previous file manager caused firewall alarms...

At least something to analyse, thanks,

guidot

You can permanently get round the issue by unregistering the shell extension:

regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files\Perforce\p4exp.dll"

However this means that you can no longer check in/out files via the right-click AND shell icons will not me modified to show their depot state.

Perforce's shell extension is absolutely rubbish in that if you try and view a file outside of your clientspec it takes ages to detect this. It brought several of our Windows machines to their knee's just normally browsing.

I have told them about this but they are really not interested in fixing it. They gave me a really bad workaround which was unsuitable since we have over 40 programmers worldwide.

Maybe I should write my own since their API is very simple.

ok, it was the Perforce plug-in; I didn't notice earlier, since other file managers as Explorer show the effect later: oDir already before displaying the context menu, others just before expanding the Perforce submenu.

thanks for helpful comments,

guidot