Hello,

I had the same issue that a few other folks have had.  World of Goo would come up with a blank screen on startup.  Moving the cursor would restore the desktop but the World of Goo process would crash.

I found a few forum posts that seemed to point to a compatibility problem between World of Goo and ThreatFire.

I have ThreatFire running on my computer and while I like World of Goo I don't plan to run without ThreatFire.  I queried ThreatFire technical support and here is what I received in response.

"This is a known issue. World of Goo uses a program called "GameGuard" as a
digital rights management solution. This program prevents any and all
"tampering" techniques".

Well, in order for ThreatFire to monitor program's behaviors, we have a program being run as a part of every application, GameGuard/World of Goo included, and this monitoring technique is considered Tampering to GameGuard. So, as a result, it causes lots of errors and crashes.

Suspending, which stops monitoring the applications, but still leaves the sensor modules active, still causes this issue. As of yet, the only way to solve this issue is to shut down ThreatFire before playing your game, however this will compromise the security of your system.

In order to shut down ThreatFire, you must hold ctrl and right-click on the tray icon, selecting "exit." then, in a run command, type "net stop threatfire" and this will shut down ThreatFire, instead of having to uninstall."

I'm not going to rant about the evils of DRM but I would like to say the following:

1.  I paid for my copy of World of Goo.
2.  No program should tell me what I can and can not run on my computer.
3.  Any program that requires that I compromise the safety and security of the operating system to run is never going to run.
4.  There MUST be a better way.

Cheers

Magus

But WoG is actually DRM-free... and, moreover, GameGuard is an anti-cheating system for MMO, not a DRM-solution. Not sure, but it looks like a little nonsense from the ThreatFire people, or maybe you got the GG stuff from a MMO.

Yes, World of Goo contains absolutely no DRM, as far as I know.

I'd be interested to hear from someone at 2D Boy on the matter so I can pass it along to ThreatFire support. 

Hi Magus, that is correct. The version of World of Goo available on this site has absolutely no DRM. I've never heard of "Game Guard".

sounds like threatfire can't infect the game as it loads in to memory & it's having fits.  Looks like the AV for people who wear tinfoil hats & keep a "explode computer" button duct taped to their hands at all times.  Sweet!

I'm really surprised they don't have an option to run a program w/o infecting it.  Strange...  I wouldn't trust that!

Also gotta say that with the ability for things to detect false positives (such as this), things like this will happen relatively frequently.  More so then normal AV. 

Also...  :)  With a response like what they posted, they obviously HAVE NOT bothered to contact the software's publisher/developer and as assuming their software is correct, which it isn't.  It's on their end.  Not very comforting support imho.

It seems more that ThreatFire does not manage well memory access.
It's sound like a generic excuse from technical support...

I purchased World of Goo from Stardock via their Impulse distribution mechanism.  Let me stress that I've had no problems with ThreatFire in the ten months I've been using it.  It's a program that does what it's supposed to and nothing more.  There's no "infection" going on.  This issue is the first time I've had an issue of any kind.

3rd parties will usually put in DRM measures (like steam for instance)

You should contact the person you bought the game from as the game here is DRM free.

I received an update from PC Tools, the developer of ThreatFire,

"it turns out that it is the way the program is coded. We use an
insertion technique to monitor other programs, and the way the program is
coded, it seems that this insertion process causes the application to
crash. When you disable the insertion mechanism, ThreatFire and the game
play without issue, even if you start up ThreatFire AFTER the game has
loaded, there is no issue. The conflict comes directly from this initial
loading pattern that they do. As of right now, there is no specific way to
get around this. I have put a bug into our system tracker, but aside from
exiting ThreatFire and then relaunching ThreatFire after it has opened,
there is no work around. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but we will be
working toward fixing this issue!"

I guess I'll have to see what happens.  I do like World of Goo and I'm very happy to find that there's no DRM embedded in the game.

Cheers

Magus