Question : Should 3rd party drivers start in safe mode?

On a forum designated to beta testing of an antivirus product, I'm having a discussion about whether the resident driver of this product should be started even in safe mode. The discussion was spawned by one particular build when that driver caused complete system failure; and since it's loaded even in safe mode, the user would not be able to repair the system easily. Predictably, the developers believe that their product is the most important object on the computer, and everything else is secondary. I think, 3rd party drivers should be starting in safe mode only when they are _necessary_, such as for example RAID driver without which the system won't see the volume at all. But I'm no expert in the area of drivers.

Can someone point to some authoritative source, such as some Microsoft guidelines, or logo certification requirements, or at least some article, that would tell what are the recommended practices in what drivers should and should not start in safe mode? also, can someone tell how is this actually controlled - how does Windows know which drivers to load in safe mode, and which to skip?

Answer : Should 3rd party drivers start in safe mode?

There is apparently not really a "best practices" guide by MS, but I think http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837643 ("How to determine whether the system is running in Safe Mode from a device driver") sums it up nicely stating "For drivers that are not mentioned earlier, check the value of the InitSafeBootMode  variable in the DriverEntry routine. Return failure if the system is in Safe Mode."