the StarForce 3.0 drivers are often linked to system instability and computer crashes.
the StarForce 3.0 drivers can cause optical drives to fail
There are also several cases of optical drive speeds being slowed down until they reach PIO mode.
On January 30, 2006, Boing Boing, a popular weblog, labeled StarForce as malware, alleging several problems associated with the protection system, including disk drive performance degradation, weakening of operating system security and stability. CNET also ran a similar story
StarForce 3.0 (all version known until August 2006) creates a real security problem when installed. The access control list of the drivers are set such that any user, including those without administrative rights, are allowed to change the association with the executable. Exploitation is simple: The user changes it to point at any arbitrarily chosen executable, which is executed with full system privileges on next reboot. This can be verified with the security tool "srvcheck2", which detects such potentially insecure driver configurations.
In March 2006, the hacker group RELOADED completely reverse-engineered StarForce 3.0, releasing a vast array of documentation about how StarForce works in the system and unveiling how several resource-hogging procedures were implemented by StarForce, such as emulated virtual machine functions and opcodes.