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Once used heavily by Outlook and Internet Explorer to store sensitive information, Protected Storage (PStore) has been depreciated to read-only in Windows Vista in favor of the more secure Data Protection API (DPAPI). Browsing the internet you’ll find a number of programs that allow you to browse through the contents of Protected Storage on previous versions of Windows, but due to the read-only limitation, there is nothing to view on a Vista machine. I’m uncertain why this service even exists on Vista, since IE7 uses DPAPI and as Microsoft notes “…any application that tries to create new PStore data items will fail.” None-the-less, despite it’s default startup setting of ‘Manual’, I find the service is currently started on my machine, and disabling it has had no noticeable effect.
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Comments
maxwell
Jul 7, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I noticed that this service is started when I start Windows Mail. Maybe this is a dependancy from the past?
Also, I see that when I disabled the service, starting Windows Mail enabled it back to “Manual” and started it. So, it’s needed by Windows Mail, for sure.
Christoph
Nov 4, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Research I did on the net on “pstore and outlook” results in the information that the pstore interface (which you refer to as the service) is available in vista as READ ONLY. I guess it’s ment to have applications be able to read some values so they do not break rightaway without the hassle of implementing a write interface… Too bad, there seems no option of downgrading lsass to the xp version.
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