[Gpg4win-users-en] How do I prevent dirmngr.exe from starting up and running in the background?

[Chris Marlow]

Hi,

> Every installation of gnupg2 does this, not Windows specific. Under Linux dirmngr also runs as a service with its own user account. Dirmngr is necessary to handle certificate revocation lists of S/MIME certificates and handles the trust in the root certificates.

Thanks for the information.

What do you mean by "Under Linux dirmngr also runs as a service with its own user account"? Could you provide an example that is using Debian as the OS?

> Yes it is launched as a system service. You can disable this like any other service in system settings / management / services.

How do you disable it? I tried many times to disable it but dirmngr would reappear as a service after each boot.

As it appears that dirmngr is resilient to being disabled, what I did was to use Symantec Endpoint Protection -my preferred antivirus, malware and firewall- to block it from communicating with the internet. Is that alright?

Best regards.

Marlow