Looking for a thread that lists which Gog games (if any) contain Starforce.
Gmer has discovered it on my system, and I'm sure that it is the cause of
recent huge slowdowns and crashes on my system.
Nice if anyone can suggest a safe link to a Starforce removal tool.
Hopefully Gog doesn't carry Starforced games, and if they do, I'm calling for a boycott.

Neither Starforce, Securom or Tages have done anything to my system after 5 years + of using them. I highly doubt Starforce is responsible for the system slowdowns you're experiencing.
All the info you need for removal is here:
http://www.star-force.com/support/drivers/
However, I recommend updating your drivers and see if that solves anything to do with incompatibility with your OS.
Check your memory and processor is working correctly, check that you don't have too many startup programs enabled, and do a system defrag.
FYI, GOG games do not have any protection schemes in their games (DRM free, remember?) so will not have Starforce.

Many GoG games used Starforce as their copy-protection (at retail), but none of them currently do. All are DRM-free (unless you consider the broad definition of the term).
I will further second Lucibel in saying that Starforce is probably just a red herring.
The only way I can think of for a GoG game to put Starforce on your rig would be if it used a special launcher, and you instead ran the original executable (which would follow the Starforce procedure of installing Starforce). That being said, you would know which game did it and wouldn't need to make this post :p

I also agree with the other ppl as GOG games are DRM free. If you have installed any games from an original disk lately . . . that is probably the source of the Starforce install. . . if that is the problem.
Here is a link which will let you see what DRM most games carry. I would check any games you have installed from disk against this list to confirm what DRM may have been installed.
Edit: You may find games in the list that GOG offers but that is referring to the original release of the game - not the games sold by GOG

Lucibel's link should help you, although (as others have already said) it's most likely something other than Starforce that's causing slowdowns and crashes.
Don't worry. Absolutely nothing sold by GOG has Starforce or any other kind of copy protection or DRM.

On my previous PC, I had two optical drives fail on me after I unknowingly started buying Starforced games (Blitzkrieg, Soldiers: Heroes of World War II ((Retail)) and others).
It wasn't sudden, granted, and I don't have concrete proof but it is a huge coincidence.
So I'm definitely wary.
But again, GOG is DRM free, so buy without a care. =)

Starforce caused me endless problems many years back because I had an external DVD +/-RW drive and no DVD-ROM drive. Apparently it did not like that. Took me awgile to figure it out. Eventually it hosed things so bad my system was unusable. Got rid of Starforce and everything was OK but my ext DVD drive went bad, too.
So it can certainly cause problems.
That's why I love GOG - DRM free and no such hassles. The way it should be.

I'm extremely glad Starforce got ditched years back. I lost two optical drives in a matter of weeks after I installed certain Starforce games. Starforce always denied they caused this when, during that period of time (2004 or so) loads of people had problems with broken drives. My USB drive was unaffected because the problem that causes the drives to die couldn't exist for USB drives (I forgot the whole explanation but it was caused by Starforce disabling a vital part of the drive which made the drive spin up way too fast causing it to die much faster).
It was a slap in the face when Starforce offered $1.000 to bring your PC to their offices in Russia and produce the problem right there and then. They used this as argument to prove Starforce was not to blame. This was ridiculous on too many levels:
- Travelling to Russia with your PC and staying there would cost well over $1.000.
- They would only cover the cost IF you produced the problem in their offices
- You'd risk damaging your own PC
- Proving it's Starforce could not be done even by hardware fanatics so even if your drive died in their office, they'd simply claim something else was the cause and ask you to prove it which, of course, you couldn't.
Then, when one of the forum moderators posted a link to a Torrent for Galactic Civilziation II, I had enough and boycotted every Starforce game released. Enough other people did so too, and luckily, it made Starforce die quickly.

Your experience mirrors mine exactly, lost two drives to Starforce as well. First clue was . . . suddenly neither would burn faster than 2x or 4x followed by intermittent working/not working . . . than just not reading a disk under any circumstances. Removed the game, replaced the drives . . did not experience the problem again, same OS, same box. That was one of my first bad experiences with DRM. . . .

You really are an idiot.
I love how the OP got low rated anyways.

I wasn't aware that StarForce caused slowdowns and crashes, but I stand corrected - Wikipedia tells me that there are reports of it doing just that. All this time I thought that all it did was write off disc drives. In 2005 I lost a combo drive after playing some StarForce-protected games. My drive became unreliable and soon could not read CDs (but strangely it could still read DVDs).

Its really amazing to me that some people just don't understand what "DRM free" really means.

Good lord...people still give serious responses to bearcat33? Really? Talk about a colossal waste of time.

His almost bi-monthly expressions of idiocy are part of the GOG charm. I still think his best one was his childish rant about how horrible the website was because it didn't have any buttons to submit a support request and how horrible everyone here was for contradicting him on it and suggesting that it might be something on his end at fault. Of course the site did (and still does) have buttons for just such things... the problem was he was using a (very) outdated version of Internet Explorer 6. He was quiet for a good 3 or 4 months after that embarrassment.

Honestly, I think it is more because a lot of people don't even know what DRM is. Just take a look here: More than a few people have claimed games were DRM-free even though there is a Disc-Check and/or serial number.