.Net installed a new account on my machine

[Atma]

I'm using XP pro, and after installing .Net, I now have to select the default user account (no other accounts are listed) to finish logging in to Windows. When I go to Control Panel and Users, I have an "ASP.NET Machine Account".

Any ideas WHY this happened, and more importantly HOW TO GET RID OF IT?

Even worse, after installing .Net, when I try to run wrpatcher.exe, I get "wrpatcher.exe is not a valid Win32 application". I rebooted after installing .Net, same error message. So, I uninstalled the program, re-downloaded it, reinstalled it, same message. So in short, the patcher isn't working for me.

I felt very uncomfortable that during the installation of .Net, I got 2 warnings from ZoneAlarm that dllhost.exe asked for access to the Internet, and msdtc.exe asked for both access and server rights. Can these applications safely be denied? I allowed them for now, but I do not like having applications running on my machine with server rights - THAT is a security hole begging to be abused.

All in all, IMHO - this version of the patcher is faulty in it's methodology. I'm sure .Net is a fine to program to work with, but don't make us suffer with jumping through hoops and doing software backflips to make it easier for the delivery of this program. It's a minor program, I'm sure there MUST have been an easier way to write it.

But since it looks like we are "stuck" with it for now, how can I fix these issues?

 

[Caleb]

I'm not Zipher, but if I had just finished coding a new patcher and a day later people started criticising my choice of programming language without any real signs of a security breach, I'd be rather irritated. I downloaded .net ages ago, (required for my ATI control panel), and I safely deleted the account. I've no experience with .net, but it's likely the new account is just a new account with enabled admin privileges. If you don't intend to ever use .net as anything more than a user, you probably won't need this account.

I'm afraid I've no idea how to fix your error - were there any errors during the .net installation?

As for the ZA permission changes - I could be wrong here but dllhost.exe should be fine if it's under C:\Windows\System32\ - anything else and it's probably malicious. msdtc.exe is a transaction manager and it comes by default with the .net package, as I understand it if you're not running a database or IIS, this shouldn't need server rights.

 

[Kasreyn]

I'm using XP pro, and after installing .Net, I now have to select the default user account (no other accounts are listed) to finish logging in to Windows. When I go to Control Panel and Users, I have an "ASP.NET Machine Account".

Any ideas WHY this happened, and more importantly HOW TO GET RID OF IT?

I noticed this too, it is pretty simple to get rid of it.

Go to control panel -> user accounts and you should see it at the bottom. Click on it and then delete the account. There you go.

KAS

 

[Axoliien]

the .NET ASP account is used to give access rights to run ASP .NET pages on an IIS server without giving access to your computer. What was happening is people install the .NET framework and IIS on their machine, and then do not give proper permissions to run the ASP service. The ASP account grants access ro run ASP to anonymous users within the IIS web directory by imitation. In other words, an anonymous user logs into the web service (which must be started) and is directed by the web service to virtual shares on the web server (the actual directories on your hard disk where ASP pages are served). By giving anonymous access to the web server read and execute, the asp pages can be read and executed, however the ASP service cannot be run since the anonymous user is not granted access to the program directory. This is where the ASP account comes into play. The ASP account allows the ASP service to be run, and return HTML to the IIS server, which in turn returns the HTML to the client.

Since the ASP account grants only access to the ASP service, anything that the ASP parser must do must have access to the directory required. This keeps ASP pages from running rampant on your machine. If you want to read a log file with an ASP page, permissions must be set up for that directory or the ASP code will fail.

Short response, again, is that the ASP account is there to run ASP scripts on a server, and cannot be hijacked unless you have malicious code on your computer and permissions available to the ASP account.