Windows Small Business Server 2003: disabling sbcrexe.exe

This is an awesome tutorial on how to kill this annoying process that forces the owner to run SBS as a domain controller.

It's also a great howto about permissions in Windows.

We have to do this because Microsoft Marketing decided that every copy of SBS should run as a Domain Controller. If you happen to have two licenses of SBS, and want to turn one SBS into a plain-old-server for file-serving purposes, or some other lesser use that would benefit from a leaner OS setup, you cannot. SBS forces you to do the "domain" thing, or you can go purchase another license for the regular Win2k3 Server.

This is why I prefer to deal with Linux. Less marketing scheme BS. Almost everything is licensed free, per seat, per cpu, or per machine.

http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?t=173731

Here's the text, by "Blarghie", copied here:

Pafts original post drew me to this thread after a google search.

I also didn't want to have to bother with this crap that my legitimate copy of Windows SBS couldn't run unless it was a DC. As it happens, we already had a second licence of SBS and simple wanted to re-use a currently un-used licence of SBS to implement a webserver, but without all the bloat that the SBS install affords.

The first thing I did was to install the server normally, the first chance you get to cancel the install of SBS bloat is when Windows starts for the first time after install, I seized my opportunity.

What I didn't see however was the quite frankly ridiculous scenario whereby Microsoft had decided to force restart the server every hour and NET SEND spam the network "this server doesn't comply with licensing requirements" across the entire network. Microsoft can stick that.

Anyway, like I said it was Pafts post that brought me here to the forum, and I've found a slightly more elegant solution to this problem rather than just aggressively killing the process until Windows gives up trying to start it again, and I'd like to share it in the hope that Google will re-index and pick it up for others to use. You may have noticed this service cannot be disabled via the MMC snap-in.

My search term on google was: how to stop the SBCore service

Anyway, down to business…
- Tools you'll need – Process Explorer from www.sysInternals.com

As you probably know, you have a service called SBCore or "SBS Core Services", which executes the following process: C:\WINDOWS\system32\sbscrexe.exe

If you kill it, it just restarts – and if you try and stop it you are told Access Denied.

If you fire up Process Explorer, you can select the process and Suspend it, now we can start to disable the thing.

Run RegEdit32.exe and expand the nodes until you reach the following hive / key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SBCore

Right click this, hit permissions and give the "Administrators" group on the local machine full access ( don't forget to replace permissions on child nodes ). F5 in regedit and you'll see all of the values and data under this key.

Select the "Start" DWORD and change it from 2 to 4 – this basically sets the service to the "Disabled" state as far as the MMC services snap-in (and windows for that matter) is concerned.

Next, adjust the permissions on the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\sbscrexe.exe so that EVERYONE account is denied any sort of access to this file.

Then go back to process explorer, and kill the sbscrexe.exe process, if it doesn't restart – congratulations!

Load up the services MMC snap-in and you should find that "SBS Core Services" is stopped and marked as Disabled.

Regards,