Shareaza

My anti-virus suite just blocked an application I've never heard of from running. I discovered it's called MediaImagesServices.exe and it's located in Programs/Shareaza.
I've looked for some explanation what it is and what it does, in a text file or in the forum, but found no mention of it.

Hari

it is a plugin used by shareaza to create preview images for video files in your library. most (if not all) shareaza plugins were recently moved from dll to exe files which could explain why you have never seen this before.

Does it automatically launch itself when it wants to, even if I'm not doing anything in Shareaza?

This just started yesterday.
Shareaza is on, but I'm not doing anything in it...and Trend pops up a box saying this app is trying to execute.

Also, I've just noticed in Windows Task Manager, this app and another one - Media Library Builder - running. I'm always in WTM and have never seen these two apps running before.
Why would these apps be running suddenly, when I'm not previewing any files?

Hari

Yes, even without you doing anything. The preview images cyko mentioned are the ones being sent to other clients who are downloading from you or got a search result from you and then asked for a preview image. So they get generated when other people ask for them, independent of your actions.

Honestly I know almost nothing about the plugins. They are not that well documented and I have most of them disabled because years ago some of them was causing a crash and I was too lazy to find out which one and just disabled everything I didn't need. Maybe someone knowledgeable could write short descriptions of each one and what they do? Same with the advanced settings.

Ok, but this is the first time this app has run on my computer - which is strange I think, since I've been running Shareaza 2.5.3.0 for a few weeks now.

How did previous versions of Shareaza display "Previews" to users? I thought users' own copy of Shareaza handled it all. I've never seen these apps in past versions.

Why is my anti-virus suite blocking this app from running if it's harmless?

What does (the other one in Programs/Shareaza) "Media Library Builder.exe" do?

If these two apps are new "features", are harmless, and don't consume too much resources, I don't think I will disable them, but I wonder why they are not explained somewhere (they probably are and I don't know it).
They don't look like "plug-ins" to me. They are both "exe" files in Shareaza.

Should I disable or delete them, or are they good new features no one has told us about yet?

Hari

In fact, they are plugins, but previously, they were dlls and each time you did start Shareaza, all of them were loaded. Now, they have been transformed into .exe files which are only loaded when necessary (so this saves computer resources), and which do not crash Shareaza if there is a crash in one of them, as they can easily be reloaded in this case.

So to reply to your question: No, you shouldn't disable them