I used to play Enemy Territory:Quake Wars a lot, but since I am having latency issues with my internet provided by Belgian provider Telenet, I have decided to stop playing it.

For those who don't know ETQW, it is a mix of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Enemy Territory and Quake. So what you basically get is Enemy Territory in the world of Quake. It is an addictive, fast-paced first-person shooter where accurate aiming, low pings, high FPS and team play is crucial. Anyway, due to my crappy Internet connection I decided to uninstall the game a couple of weeks ago.

I noticed that my computer was running slow so using tools such as Process Monitor I took a look at what processes where running in the background to figure out which ones could be disabled. One of these processes that was running was named PnkBstrA.exe, which is apparently a PunkBuster Service. For those who don't know what PunkBuster is, it is an anti-cheat program developed by Even Balance.

PunkBuster needs to run with Administrative privileges because of the heuristics it uses to scan libraries ... Instead of having to run your games as an Administrator, Even Balance made the decisions to develop a Windows service that interacts with the PunkBuster system and you no longer need to run your games with full administrative privileges. This service is installed starting from PunkBuster v1.500.

When you uninstall a PunkBuster-enabled game, the PunkBuster services will not be uninstalled automatically which is logical because you might have more than one PunkBuster-enabled game installed on your machine. Therefore you will need to uninstall the PunkBuster services manually using the tool PBSVC Setup Program which you can download from here.

Click Run on the File Download - Security Warning dialog.

Click Run on the Internet Explorer - Security Warning (we are getting closer).

Select the option Un-Install/Remove PunkBuster Service and click Next.

Read and accept the End User License Agreement by clicking I Agree.

The PunkBuster service has been uninstalled. Click Finish and you are done!