Designating the "trusted" programs

The protection of folders performed by Folder Guard may confuse some of the system utilities, such as backup or disk managing software. For example, if your backup software allows you to specify which folders to backup, and you leave the protection in effect during the backup, the folders you've made Hidden or Empty with Folder Guard may not be backed up. (On the other hand, if the backup software stores a complete image of the disk disregarding its folder structure, it may be safe to leave the protection on, since Folder Guard does not prevent the direct access to the disk sectors.)

To avoid such problems, you could add your backup and disk utilities to the Trusted Programs list of Folder Guard. When performing the protection, Folder Guard intercepts the requests from programs to open files, list the contents of folders, etc. If such a request comes from a program that is designated by you as a trusted one, Folder Guard passes the request on to the operating system without any intervention, thus allowing the program to have full access to all folders on your computer. If the name of the program is not in the Trusted Programs list, Folder Guard allows or denies such request according to the attributes of the files and folders set up by you.

Originally, the trusted modules list contains the names of several system modules (such as REGSVR32, MSGSRV32, etc.) that must have full access to all files and folders on your computer in order for Windows to operate properly. You may change the set of the trusted modules by using the Protect - Trusted Modules command.

Note that only Windows applications (32 bit or 16 bit) can be designated as the trusted ones. You may add a name of a DOS program or a console application to the Trusted Programs list, but it will be ignored by Folder Guard.

Which programs should or should not be made "trusted"?

You may wish to add to the Trusted Modules list the names of the system tools such as anti-virus utility, disk defragmenter, disk scanner, backup utility, etc. If you do so, you won't have to manually disable the protection before running such tools, since they will have full access to all your folder and files anyway, as if Folder Guard was not present in your system at all.

The following programs should NOT be made trusted:

Explorer: If you add this module to the trusted modules list, Windows Explorer will be allowed full access to all files and folders, even to those you have marked as hidden or empty with Folder Guard!

KERNEL32: If your computer is connected to a network and you share some of your drives or folders, this module is used by Windows to provide information about your files and folders on the shared drives over the network. If you make it trusted, all your files and folders will be accessible to other network users.