BoxCryptor & Windows 7

fbergeon

I have been using BoxCryptor for a few months and I am having serious issues on my new laptop running Windows 7.

The easies symptom to describe is this: if you double-click on a data file residing on my BoxCryptor X: drive, the corresponding application fails to start (e.g. double click on a docx file, Word does not start). Similarly, if you create a shortcut on the desktop pointing to a file on the BoxCryptor drive and double-click it, an error is shown indicating the file cannot be found. The file, however, can be opened from within the application with File->Open.

It turns out that the BoxCryptor drive does not seem to implement Windows 7 security and "executing" a file in these conditions is not allowed.

Question: is the BoxCryptor drive NTFS or FAT32?

fbergeon

A little clarification: this problem behavior only exists if the executable runs as Administrator. If it does not run as Administrator, then the file or shortcut opens without problem.

fbergeon

And one additional note. I have been running BoxCryptor 1.0.0.0 for months which is very stable. I had tried to upgrade to 1.0.0.1 in the past but there were some performance issues. Today, I upgraded to 1.1.0.0 but I had to roll it back as well after some unexpected behavior (Visual Studio crashing on a project residing on my DropBox drive). When I went back to version 1.0.0.0 it went back to normal...

All this makes BoxCryptor a good candidate for replacement. I really loved the product, but now I am looking for an alternative.

fbergeon

Update on the top issue: the behavior described is not continuous. It seems that after reinstall and/or reboot, invoking the "Run as Admin" executable by opening the file now works...

Bigger picture: the main issue I was tracking was running some code that resides on the BoxCryptor drive. The code binds to a socket to listen for TCP connections. When the code is ran on an XP machine it works fine. When it is ran from a W7 machine (same exact code), I get an exception when trying to bind to the socket. If the code is moved to a non-BoxCryptor drive on the W7 machine, it works fine. I believe the issue is with the fact that the BoxCryptor drive may not be compatible with W7 security.

Robert

Hi fbergeon,

it seems you came across two known issues which are documented in our Knowledge Base:

Can portable software executed in the BoxCryptor drive open a TCP/IP socket?
I can not run a program as administrator when it is located in my BoxCryptor drive.

BoxCryptor currently does neither support the connection to TCP/IP sockets nor Windows UAC. We're currently working on a major code rewrite of BoxCryptor for Windows which addresses also these issues.

--Robert