Maybe you have noticed, that when you buy a new computer from HP it is loaded with lots of software. Most of them are considered very “helpful” by HP staff – maybe for home users they are. But most of them are just software that you won’t probably ever use. Among them there’s HP Client Security which in my opinion might be useful by allowing you for example to use your fingerprint for login or managing your hard drive encryption and so on. Among features of this software is HP Password Manager. This tool is used for asking you to store your credentials in a secure vault on your computer every time you login on some login page in the Internet. It is proven, that sometimes it kicks so often, that posting on forums is almost impossible. Read this topic :)

I have tried to disable it with HP Security Control Panel, preferences and even if I disable prompt for remembering password it displays other popup (which can be ignored) – but what if I want to completely disable that tool?

Well, according to this post there is quite simple method:

  1. Open task manager and kill DpAgent.exe and DPAgent.exe *32.
  2. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Hewlett-Packard\HP ProtectTools Security Manager\Bin
  3. Rename DPAgent.exe to DPAgent.old

I have tried this on few computers as well as deploying script with Group Policy and it seems to do the trick. I am sure, that it can be disabled in some more “gentle” way (maybe autorun – but I didn’t find any relevant items) or registry (but I didn’t have time to search through it).

One thing is HP updates, if they’re enabled HP Client security will more likely get updated thus this workaround will get overwritten. It’s a pitty that someone at HP is forcing you to use software that you don’t want to use and not giving you any option to disable it. Moreover this software is totally optional, your PC will work well regardless it’s installed or not.

EDIT:

You can also disable it in registry  by editing key

“Userinit”=”C:\Windows\system32\userinit.exe,C:\Program Files (x86)\Hewlett-Packard\HP ProtectTools Security Manager\Bin\DPAgent.exe,”

in hive:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]

Just delete “C:\Program Files (x86)\Hewlett-Packard\HP ProtectTools Security Manager\Bin\DPAgent.exe”

so it would look like:

“C:\Windows\system32\userinit.exe,” <–comma at the end is important!

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