[jeroenhd]

There is, you can go into the NTFS permissions and just deny access to every group and user on every type of file access. I did that for compattelrunner.exe*

Windows has so far randomly undone these changes so there's probably some kind of recovery mechanism that gets triggered when you alter file permissions. A script running on login setting the permissions through powershell seems to have put that stupid executable in stasis on my machine at least, so perhaps it works for curl too.

* compattelrunner is a telemetry generation tool that seemingly cannot be killed. I have applied every registry hack, privacy tool, and Windows setting, but that damned thing will not be disabled. If it weren't for the driver signature enforcement, I would've written a minifilter driver that makes all files with that name disappear to finally rid myself of this curse.