Can't disable Wallet, buyer's remorse

Mission Creep

I've had this product less than 24 hours and already have severe buyer's remorse. I spoke with customer service (chat) within the first 15 minutes and that CS encounter only heightened my misgivings.

I used to run a cloud-based AV that was extremely resource light and very easy to turn on and off for gaming, etc. I switched to BitDefender for my parents (I bought a 3-pack) so they'd have something automated. In fact, my dad's computer can barely handle web-browsing (it's brand new, but only has 2GB RAM running Windows 10--he didn't consult me before purchasing) and trying BD was a huge mistake. To a certain extent this is probably true of any locally installed (hard drive, not cloud) AV service given his computer specs.


I installed it on my school laptop, planning to tweak the configuration to suit, but quickly found out that's not possible. BD Wallet runs even though it's not activated. There's no way I'm installing this on my desktop (gaming) PC.

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You can easily search the forums (or the Internet generally) to see that this has been an ongoing problem for YEARS with multiple unanswered help and feature requests. They've literally never once been answered AFAICT. If I'm wrong, by all means point me to the thread that will show me how to permanently disable the Bitdefender Wallet process for Windows 10 in BD 2017.

Forum search for disable wallet

In prior editions, you could easily disable the Wallet using msconfig or services.msc (or a 3rd party app like CCleaner). What did the development team come up with after all these complaints? They've now hidden the process so that you can NEVER shut them down or use workarounds.

You can clearly see the Wallet entry in Task Manager, but it's invisible to Windows Services and Startup configurations.

Mission Creep

Well you can't edit or delete your posts?

I tinkered with this quite a bit, and was about to try HijackThis (it's a good app but should only be used as a last resort) but decided to try one more reboot..Wallet is currently NOT running. I don't know what happened, but I'm grateful.

You can see here that Wallet has run even though disabled. I understand that it wasn't using many resources, but that's not the point. CPU/Memory usage is often death by a thousand cuts.

It's like with smartphone apps: EVERY. SINGLE. SITE. has its own app they want you to install, and every app also wants to enable push notifications by default.

Windows 10 has a lot of processes running in the background (Edge notoriously) including Calculator. What exactly is the calculator doing when not open?


If every single program on a PC also wants to have a background process (most auto-update by default) that's just not tenable.