Hello there. I just found another bundled program called SettingsGuard and wanted give you some removal instructions. SettingsGuard seems to be a variant of BitGuard that I’ve written about before. If SettingsGuard is running on your computer, you will see SettingsGuard.exe and sg.exe running in the Windows Task Manager:

You will also see loader.dll and ld64.dll registered as APPInit_Dlls. I’ll show how to remove SettingsGuard in this blog post with the FreeFixer removal tool.

So, how did SettingsGuard install on your machine? It was probably bundled with some download that you installed recently. Bundling means that software is included in other software’s installers. When I first found SettingsGuard, it was bundled with a download called Codec Perforer. Guess that is typo and it should be Codec Performer. This is how SettingsGuard was disclosed in Codec Perforer’s installer when I found it:

The installer file is digitally signed by Elephant Tech Software LLC.

Generally, you can avoid bundled software such as SettingsGuard by being careful when installing software and declining the bundled offers in the installer.

When I mess around with some new bundled software I usually upload it to VirusTotal to test if the anti-virus tools there find something. 35% of the antimalware scanners detected the sg.exe file. The SettingsGuard files are detected as Gen:Variant.Strictor.73974 by Ad-Aware, Riskware.Agent! by Agnitum and a variant of Win32/SmartCyberTech.A by ESET-NOD32.

If you would like to remove SettingsGuard you can do so with the freeware FreeFixer tool. Select the SettingsGuard items for removal in FreeFixer, click Fix, restart your machine and the problem will be gone. Here’s a few screenshots to point you in the right direction:

Hope that helped you to figure out how to do the removal.

Did you also find SettingsGuard on your system? Any idea how it installed? Please share in the comments below. Thank you very much!

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for reading.