DEP (Data Execution Protection)

[Loxa]

Ok for a while now I have been playing a game online which kept crashing and giving me appcrash errors, after some google'ing and searching around I found a post about adding an exception into DEP which I have done and not yet received any more crashes. So my question is will there be any down sides to this or negative outcomes?

Spoiler

Faulting application name: TERA.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x52ce4857
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18247, time stamp: 0x521ea8e7
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x000ce753
Faulting process id: 0xb7c
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf21ed299e89a3
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\TERA\Client\Binaries\TERA.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 9843981b-8deb-11e3-89cf-bc5ff48a579c

 

[Loxa]

Bump

 

[WalderX]

I would say absolutely no harm in disabling DEP. I believe it is only used to prevent mailicious code from running in a very select set of circumstances. You will probably be able to disable it entirely and see no issues ever. Microsoft explanation:

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature that can help prevent damage to your computer from viruses and other security threats. Harmful programs can try to attack Windows by attempting to run (also known as execute) code from system memory locations reserved for Windows and other authorized programs. These types of attacks can harm your programs and files.

DEP can help protect your computer by monitoring your programs to make sure that they use system memory safely. If DEP notices a program on your computer using memory incorrectly, it closes the program and notifies you.