Question. How to completely disable WD Smart screen

Have either of you run into problems by killing SmartScreen?

I haven't seen anyone else bring this up, so I doubt Microsoft will fix this anytime soon.

I had exactly the same problem with smartscreen.exe running on startup and then won't disappear!!!

This issue occurred after I had actually uninstalled the latest April Cumulative Security Updates as a means attempt at solving this issue. Normally this smartscreen.exe kept coming on startup and then at least after a few minutes it would disappear even with the 1809 update.

Now I wanted to stop this issue from occurring at startup, but what's bizarre is that when I uninstalled those latest security updates it initially made the situation worse as the smartscreen.exe would not even go away after a few minutes from the initial startup!

I had my breakfast and came back half an hour later and saw that this smartscreen.exe was still running in the background and chewing 5MB RAM in Task Manager.

TairikuOkami said:

I just get rid of it, like of any other pest, that annoys me.

Code:

takeown /f "%WinDir%\System32\smartscreen.exe" /a
icacls "%WinDir%\System32\smartscreen.exe" /grant:r Administrators:F /c
taskkill /im smartscreen.exe /f
del "%WinDir%\System32\smartscreen.exe" /s /f /q

So I then followed this advice to completely get rid off smartscreen.exe. This solved the issue somewhat. However, I wasn't too convinced that this was the best way of solving the problem.

What happened was that upon deleting this smartscreen.exe when I went to Security settings the Windows Defender Smartscreen would freeze and not respond.

So I made the experiment and reinstalled the latest April cumulative security updates. This returned back Smartscreen.exe in C:\Windows\System32 and now it is no longer running in Task Manager at startup.

I think this is a bug. The solution is ---> Delete smartscreen.exe with the above method by TairikuOkami. Then --->Uninstall Windows security update, restart computer. --->Reinstall the security update again, this will return Smartscreen.exe back to the Windows System32 folder. But this time the glitch will be rectified so it does not pop-in at windows startup.

I made several computer restarts to verify this and it seems so far this issue is no longer occurring. I hope this helps.

Disabling smartscreen by deleting it/removing the permission to execute it/adding a null debugger option to image execution policy will give you a bunch of error logs regarding DCOM failing to launch it.

Not sure about the Windows Update option because I do not want to experiment with installing updates at this time.

PS: About the necroposting, 1809 is still relevant because LTSC