I was running ExploitShield, but now, no more. The reality is, mitigations built into Windows 7 and 8 natively provide some of the protection offered by ES, but sadly, XP's time has passed, and it never can, or will be, be brought up to the level of security provided by the newer OS's.
I did have a spot of trouble uninstalling ES. There was a hang in TMP folders used at the end of the uninstall process that could not be terminated any other way than by Task Manager.
(See attached .jpg below)
Two separate processes stopped running, _ui14D2N.tmp and unins000.exe. This happened even though I granted permission for both to run through Online Armor. Killing _ui14D2N.tmp did close the other process normally. I also used CCleaner to remove registry keys obviously related to ES, but no other keys were deleted.
So, no system damage was done as far as I can tell atm.
Disappointed a little bit here, but, thanks to Polonus, it may be that ES is not all that, and never will be. Only the passage of time will tell, but I am sure this type of thing has happened many times before, as many start-up vendors will have to fail before one actually succeeds.
An additional note: It was very easy to kill the ExploitShield.exe process just by exiting the Z icon in the system tray. Whether this was by design or not, it would seem that some hardening of the running process would need to be made to ensure that it would continue to run in case a system was attacked by malware designed to stop this process.