Yesterday I discovered one of the reasons which I hate Windows, but which I had not actually ever experienced first hand. While installing the various applications that I needed for the new installation, I was downloading something I needed. Apparently I clicked somewhere I did not intend to (I had not yet installed Mozilla, so was still running IE). Within just a few seconds, the CPU was pegged and the network went wild. I yanked the network cable, and started to investigate. There were about 6 processes running that I didn’t know what they were. These included bargain.exe, optimize.exe, discount.exe, WindUpdate.exe, and a variety of other things that I don’t remember right now. The uninstallers actually started up additional copies of these things. It took me about a half hour to hunt them all down in the file system and in the registry and remove them all. I’m still a little uncomfortable with it, and will probably reinstall the whole thing when I get a moment. I installed SP2, which makes me a little happier with it, but it was with great trepidation that I put it back on the network. It’s shut off now, and I think I’ll probably run Etherape the next time I turn it on, to see if it’s making any outbound network connections.

This sort of thing really should *NOT* be possible.