While making ignore rules for Secunia's PSI for my \I386 and \UBCD4Win folders, I was reminded that the CD made by UBCD4Win is "at" the SP2 level, not benefitting from the monthly patching we do to keep XP secure.

Since we may allow UBCD4Win to access the Internet, and our hard disks, at the same time, isn't that a security risk?

The answer I saw elsewhere was that this is actually a BartPE issue, and that UBCD4Win is just a recovery environment, not a full OS.

Is there any development on this front?

Currently UBCD4Win can work with XP SP3 with only one known issue... the ability to open CHM files which will be addressed at a later time after the actual release of SP3 is finalized and no other changes are being made.

There is no PE enviroment that is a full blown OS... they are all limited and since UBCD4Win is built with BartPE... it shares those same limitations.

Just a thought, but in all these years, I have NEVER heard of anyone posting that they were running a limited OS from read-only media and got infected from the internet. Not one time since 2003, don't you think it would have happened by now?

Interesting thing about PE is that its normally run from a CD, thus you cannot write to the system drive, which is where all known virus/malware is targeted to infect. Most malware associated issues are generally related to registry entries that start services or programs when you restart windows and PE never saves the registry even when installed to a hard disk or USB device. Then lets add the fact that the temp folders on an a ram drive and never get written to any physical medium, the chance of getting infected through bartpe would be similar to being struck by lightning, while in a submarine, while reading the current issue of Playboy magazine.