The Problem

I have several Perl programs constantly running on Windows 98/ME/NT computers. These programs run tests on our products, gather test data and send the results to web a site on our local area network.

I have been investigating problems with the programs slowing down or crashing in the middle of the night and even a few minutes after the test starts. Often the computer locks up with an "Out of memory error" or the program CLISV95.EXE not reponding.

After doing some investigating I found out that the program CLISV95.EXE is part of some Microsoft Software called SMS (Software Management System). See this article on SMS and how to get rid of it. This software is automatically installed everytime we log onto the corporate network. My boss has talked to the IT department about getting rid of this software without results.

SMS Description

This is a description of what SMS is from the article.

SMS is a Microsoft product, Systems Management Server. SMS is mainly used by sysadmins for software and hardware inventory, product licensing and remote diagnostics. It's a client-server big brother, with a client on every PC sending back information about the machine to the SMS server. Amongst other things the sysadmin has the abilty to scan the entire hard drive and catalog every .EXE on your machine, as well as forcing you to take downloads he thinks is necessary for your PC to run correctly.

The SMS client software is typically installed on the client PC by a WinNT login script. The login script installs some base software, including a new control panel, to the client PC. The base software then runs in the background, and installs some more control panels and software, known as agents, to the PC. These agents are typically the hardware and software agents, which run periodically in the background and collect information about the PC before sending the information back to the SMS server.

The SMS client is supposed to be transparent - the user should not notice it is running, and it should not affect any other programs. I say "should" because that's not always the case. For most users (secretary's, financial, HR etc) it runs as designed, but for power-users, especially developers, it's a real PITA. Is this problem a bug in your code, a bug in you development environment, or is SMS generally screwing things up?

How to get rid of it

Before we rebel and create our own network in the Engineering department I would like to try disabling SMS. According to the article you can make some changes to the Registry to disable SMS or write protect the Autoexec.bat file in Windows 95/98 computers. The changes to registry work for a few days but SMS eventually comes back. A can write a quick Perl program to change the registry.

Any ideas?

In reply to Big Brother Is Watching? by JohnB

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