Sky By Broadband is not what it seems Part II 31st March 2006

In a follow up to my previous post on Sky By Broadband I will show you how to disable its downloading abilities when its not in use.

1. Remove the KService file sharer service from starting automatically each time Windows is restarted: Click on the start menu->run and type regedit. Using the tree on the left navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and remove the key with the name “kdx”
2. Now navigate to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services
3. You will see an entry titled KService.exe. Thats the service that will continuously run in the background. Double click the entry and then stop the service by clicking “Stop”, then set its Startup type to “Disabled”

Thats it. Now it won’t be running all the time. If you want to use SBB later on then follow the last two steps and set KService.exe to startup Automatically, Apply and click Start. Just remember to Disable it again when your done.

On Windows 2000/XP you can check whether the service is running by hitting CTRL-ALT-DELETE, choosing Task Manager and then the “Processes” tab. If you see kservice.exe in the list of processes, then its running again.

So now you know how to control the beast what can you do with it? Well you can navigate to the folder that kservice runs out of and tinker with its config files.  On a standard setup you can find it under C:\Program Files\KService if you look inside the “data” folder and enable showing hidden files via the “Tools->Folder Options” panel you will see a few hidden xml files. The one with all the juicy bits in it is called “zprefs_db.xml”. I have to admit I’ve been pretty busy lately so I haven’t actually had a proper look into this file but the first time I plan on using SBB I will definitely pull it apart first.

So I haven’t fully uninstalled it myself as I am planning on using the system later on. I’m pretty sure that doing the uninstall that is provided with SBB will not remove the Kservice system. To do that manually on Windows XP:

1. stop and disable the service as listed above
2. navigate to start->run and type “sc delete KService” (and tap enter). That will remove it from the services list
3. now navigate to the KService folder which is usually at the location I mentioned earlier and then delete the whole thing
4. navigate to your user folder i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\Your user name\Application Data and delete the Kontiki folder. You will have to enable showing hidden and system folders via “Tools->Folder Options” to do this.
5. There’s a bunch of registry keys for it as well but I don’t have the full list at the moment. You should be fine leaving them there for now although I’ll post an update later to list which to manually remove