Sandboxie 5.31.6 is out, compatible with W10 1909

Sandboxie 5.31.6 was released today. This version is compatible with W10 1909, and earlier versions of W10.

Sandboxie 5.31.6 available for download - Sandboxie Forum - Sandboxie - Sophos Community

Read and follow the New instructions for downloading.

Sandboxie - Download the latest version of Sandboxie

I haven't updated to W10 1909 yet but this SBIE version is working great in 1903.

Bo

I'm not sure when, exactly, this started happening, but probably around the release of 1909. Some of Sandboxie's functionality which is of most value to me has stopped working.

This is the ability to do sandboxed installs of simple software. Even if the installer is invoked within Sandboxie using UAC administrator privileges, the installs invariably fail either due to access errors in copying/renaming files to the target folder, inability to access the Windows installer service, or both. I am not talking about installs that always fail under a Sandbox; e.g. device driver, service, hardware installs. That is a given. But installs that used to work, now don't.

There have been some discussion on the Sophos forums, whose direction has been disappointing in that it seems unlikely this is going to change. The ability to "test install" software has been one of the most useful features. Will have to start investigating the simplest, most pain free way of trying this stuff inside a VM from now on.

mike s said:

This is the ability to do sandboxed installs of simple software. Even if the installer is invoked within Sandboxie using UAC administrator privileges, the installs invariably fail either due to access errors in copying/renaming files to the target folder, inability to access the Windows installer service, or both. I am not talking about installs that always fail under a Sandbox; e.g. device driver, service, hardware installs. That is a given. But installs that used to work, now don't.

Hi Mike, there is a problem between Sandboxie and the Windows Installer Service. MSI installers cant run in a sandbox in W10. I think it started in W10 1809. MSI installers can still run properly sandboxed in W7 so this is a W10 problem with SBIE.

For me is not a big ideal as I dont install too many programs sandboxed but I know some people are suffering because of this. I doubt this is going to be fixed anytime soon.

Try using regular exes for sandboxed installs. They still work fine sandboxed. For example if a program you want to install sandboxed, offers MSI and exe installers, use the exe (Look at picture below).



For what is worth. Sandboxie 5.31.6 and W10 1909 are working great together. I cant find anything wrong in any of the activities I do under Sandboxies supervision on a daily basis.

Bo

Begging Bo to beg his "secret contact" that works on Sandboxie to try and figure and find a solution to this MSI problem, sometimes .exe versions of installers are not available.

Couldn't one just figure out which Windows Service is being run when an MSI installer is started and have it be excluded from running Sandboxed?

Special said:

Begging Bo to beg his "secret contact" that works on Sandboxie to try and figure and find a solution to this MSI problem, sometimes .exe versions of installers are not available.

A few weeks ago I made him aware of this MSI issue. Curt doesn't have much time for Sandboxie anymore, but at least he now knows about it. The urgency of fixing this issue is about a 1 in a 1 to 10 range of importance.

Regarding the installers. Most installers I come across are exes.

Bo

Many .EXE installers are merely wrappers for embedded MSI's which require the Windows Installer service to complete the task anyway, so that is not always a useful workaround.

But worse: my own recent trials with Sandboxie and .EXE installers which use other engines (e.g. Inno Setup, InstallShield, etc) is that there are other hurdles. At some point in which the installer is copying files to the target %programfiles% folder, or even an %appdata% staging ground, the process aborts with a long series of error messages which indicate access problems in writing to those folders. This happens even if the installer is invoked with admin privs from within Sandboxie. This never used to happen with earlier versions of Windows 10.

I know what you mean. There is one program for downloading videos that sometimes I install sandboxed but cant do it anymore in W10. The installer (an exe) looks for dlls that are part of Microsoft Visual and when it doesn't find them, it causes the install to fail. So, I know installing programs in a sandbox has become more difficult than it used to.

When I told Curt about the MSI problem, he was like he didn't know about it. Perhaps he will look at it when he has spare time but as you probably know, things have changed. Pretty much the only support we can expect right now is for Sandboxie to work properly with the latest release of W10 and the major browsers. Anything else is way down in the list of priorities.

Other that this issue, Sandboxie is working great with W10 1909. I can live with this just fine. I dont use Sandboxie for testing programs that much, I use it for security, for running most programs and files I run in a daily basis, and for that, Sandboxie is working as good as ever in W10 1909 (and W7).

Bo

Sandboxie 5.33.1 was released earlier today.

Sandboxie 5.33.1 is available for download - Sandboxie Forum - Sandboxie - Sophos Community

It fixes the problem described in the thread below.

[FIXED] Microsoft Accounts - Sandboxie Forum - Sandboxie - Sophos Community

In short, the fix makes it possible to login your Microsoft accounts without the need of using a workaround. I dont use MS accounts so I cant confirm the fix indeed works but it should be fine.

And FWIW, Sandboxie 5.33.1 is working fine in my W10 18363.535 as all I do sandboxed is as good as always.

Bo