First, I am not trying to circumvent any type of regional pricing with my VPN. Rather I want to maintain the highest level of security and privacy without having to go through the sequence of deactivating the VPN, launching an application, then reactivating the VPN.

My VPN does allow me to exclude applications and/or IP address from being forced through the VPN tunnel. I have tried to exclude all the obvious GOG executables but GOG still gets an error and crashes. So, I am wondering if there is a specific executable or IP address that add to the exclusion list and have GOG work while my VPN is active.

You can't just allow GOG Galaxy through the tunnel? I mean, maybe you have your reasons, but this seems like the easiest solution. What VPN are you using?

I mean on the website it should work fine. You will get more Captchas but you should expect that by now. Depending on the VPN I may be able to help with galaxy but without knowing which one you are using I can not help.

The VPN that I use is ProtonVPN.

As for allowing GOG Galaxy through the tunnel, I have add the files:
GalaxyClient Helper.exe
GalaxyClient.exe
GalaxyClientService.exe
GOG Galaxy Notifications Renderer.exe
GalaxyCommunication.exe
GalaxyUpdater.exe
to the exclusion list, and still when I launch GOG Galaxy with VPN active, I will get "GOG Galaxy - Fatal Error Connection to Communication Service was lost and could not be restored! GOG Galaxy will now shutdown."

Ick, you have to configure every program individually with that? Do you also need to allow services individually? Because Galaxy has a few services it runs as well that connect.


EDIT: Are you using the free version or a paid version of ProtonVPN?

Sorry for the delayed response, I got caught up with other stuff.

I am using a paid version of ProtonVPN.

But I did some testing with ProtonVPN’s older and newer connections since I had noticed some issues with other applications. So Yesterday I removed all GOG exclusions from ProtonVPN and tried restarting GOG while connected to the older and newer connections. At the time GOG would fail on the older connections and succeeded on the newer connections. Thus, explaining the hit and miss performance for GOG Galaxy in the past. Today when I tried the older and newer connections, they both worked so I am guessing a behind the scenes change many have occurred. If so then thank you.

Help!
I can't connect to GOG while using VPN tethering connection from my smartphone
I'm using Psiphon and Every Proxy app

I'm probably about to be hit with an avalanche of negativity. However, I use VPNs and proxies to pirate the Internet.

Well, you certainly don't use it to purchase games...

Please refrain from publishing posts that promote piracy. Such a behavior is against our CoC: https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001814049-Forum-Code-of-Conduct?product=gog. I'm giving you an official warning. Further violations of our rules may result in a ban. If you have any questions regarding moderation please contact me or any other moderator through private message.

VPNs do not really protect you against much,
All that Advertising for VPNs is doing, is promoting FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)

Yes, from what i have heard, in the US, some providers are really abusing your data.
But consider one thing: If you are using a VPN, the VPN provider can now see everything that you do, the same way that your provider could. What is stopping the VPN provider from abusing your data? Likely the same as for your ISP: nothing. Especially if the VPN provider is a US company.
And don't fall for promises of "not logging anything". There have been several cases of such promises being broken, resulting in fines, or even arrests for VPN customers.

And nowadays, virtually every website is SSL encrypted. Let's encrypt enabled everyone to get a free certificate, and many websites now use SSL. So there is not much a VPN would protect against. With SSL, the only thing your provider, or anyone tapping your connection, can see is the URLs of the websites you are visiting. The content is encrypted.
Any way of intercepting and decrypting an SSL connection would work regardless of wheter you are using a VPN, or not.

On the other hand, as you have noticed here, a VPN generally reduces funktionality. Even if a website does not outright block access via VPN, you will still share the IP address of the VPN endpoint with a bunch of other users. Active VPN endpoints that are in use by a lot of users might be rate limited, or might fall under a general spam suspicion.

So what is left as a VPN use?
It may be usesful in a country with an opressive regime, if you are politically active. But i would not use a garden variety VPN in that case anyway.
So there is one majoer use left: Circumventing region locks. And that is very frowned upon by any company implementing such locks.

Not entirely. It can unlock things that are regional, so say i could access French movies on NetFlix that are locked for France and not for the world.

You have fully secure end-to-end encryption, and with encrypted SSL you get double encryption which can be a good thing. But there's enough places that don't use SSL.

Now it won't protect sites from identifying you if you're using a browser, namely you need to clean out your cookies and data for that to matter. Though supposedly based on patterns they can string together two anonymous pieces of data to combine to the same person, or so they say.

So far i have 2 big uses for a VPN. A number of 'free' file upload sites limit how much you can download in a day or need you to wait 2 hours before you can download again. By switching locations it loses that information and you don't have to wait.

The second is privacy if you do any Torrenting. Last thing you need is an email threatening you with legal action because you happened to download a movie as a backup for a DVD you already own but the disc doesn't read very well.

In theory they could. But you got to go somewhere eventually to expose the first hop to. Using a proxy server could also log your data, but from-ip to-ip time/date and a few other bits don't really do much at that point. I'm slightly more concerned about smart phones constantly pinging Google with your location data and doing things in the background vs the VPN.

But there's a lot of data that has to be unencrypted at certain levels to work. Encrypted SSL may be fine for the data you send/receive but if the URL and IP address points to say PornHub, it isn't too hard to find out your interests or what you were doing even if they can't see the data. Metadata can be more valuable than the actual data.

I use ProtonVPN and I don't have to whitelist/tunnel anything.
Some of the servers won't work with galaxy, I suggest trying a new one.

VPN with kill switch is pretty much a must have nowadays for privacy in country doing some traffic surveillance as they do in France, it's a bit shady on the who they track, there is a lot of activism on the subject with Parti Pirate and Quadrature du Net. Obviously, today pretty much every country does this.

Also, it's a must have in any public WiFi like airports & such; hackers can make your traffic go through their computer and exploit critical breach (or even simple human error) to spoof certificates, way easier if you have obsolete hardware / not up to date software, this is mandatory.

Indeed. I've used a VPN before where the rules weren't too strict and I'd occationally get pings from inside/outside of networks and one would produce an error while the other wouldn't. Though, when i took away the option/access without the VPN the problem went away.

Kinda a sad state of affairs to need this.