I'd like to somehow hook into the local system's network stack to capture outgoing network packets without using Winpcap. Unfortunately it tends to crash my system every now and then.
Is there a way to "sniff" outgoing traffic of the local system from a user space process written in a .NET language?
I use smsniff from NIRSOFT. You need to be admin on the machine to sniff any traffic.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/smsniff.html
I have never seen .net used to sniff traffic. But maybe NetMon from Microsoft has a COM interface you call from .Net
But as always you need to be admin to sniff traffic, since it is needed to put the NIC in promiscuous mode.
What you want is the Network Monitor API. More here and here.