Even though the game was gone, the launcher was still waiting. Every morning, at 8:00 AM, it tried to connect to a dead authentication server in Riga to check for updates to a game that didn't exist anymore.
I killed the process (finally succeeded via taskkill /f /pid in an admin CMD). I deleted the folder. I rebooted, feeling victorious.
Forty-five second boot time. Open Task Manager. ISTHG Launcher.exe is back. The task had recreated itself. ISTHG Launcher.exe
The uninstaller was broken. It removed the Steam files, but it left the launcher . The dev had coded his own anti-cheat/bootstrapper that ran at the kernel level (hence the SYSTEM task). The launcher was designed to pre-load the game's assets into RAM for "instant play."
The trigger? At system startup, repeat every hour, run indefinitely. Even though the game was gone, the launcher
I did what any rational person would do. I Googled it.
There was a task named MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTaskMachine (sneaky), but when I opened its properties, the action was not updating Edge. The action was: I deleted the folder
Reboot.
 |
Design By Kuper |  |