I am writing this mainly in the hopes it may be useful info/warning for others. (after all these forums seem to be Google indexed). Also questions at the end.
I was looking into Windows Controlled Folder Access on my Windows 10 Home laptop, and found a thread https://forum.eset.com/topic/13514-controlled-access-folders-with-defender-in-1709/ that mentioned that there are HIPS rules/filters "ask" where I can protect access to certain folders.
Well. I tried. I created a rule "for all apps" with "file operations" and at the end specified a specific folder containing some PDFs.
It seems I did something wrong: ESET started blocking *every* file access by *every* program on the system, essentially making the system unusable, and essentially making me unable to revert the changes, as even the ESET Gui wasn't reacting properly anymore. I could continue to click some operations, but was unable to make any changes persist in ESET, and after a while the system would basically hang in a "Please wait ..." windows screen.
After fiddling around, I managed to get into a recovery console of Win10 (*a) and was able to rename the ESET program folder from "ESET" to "ESET_disabled" thereby preventing the ESET service from starting on next reboot.
I took a quick peek into the registry to see if the options would be changeable there, but no luck so far. Too much, too cryptic in regedit.
Anyways, I will now try to remove ESET and probably reinstall it, keeping my fingers away from these stupid HIPS rules.
A few questions though:
* Is there any supported way to change ESET settings via registry keys (or maybe via the command line) while the ESET service is stopped?
* Something like having the ESET service start fully disabled next time it's started, so that it cannot interfere and I can revert messed up settings.
Fun. Fun. Fun. :-(
(*a): The Windows Login Screen isn't affected by the ask rules, so I was able to reboot, press SHIFT+reboot there and go into the recovery console and rename the folder from the command line there.
