I realise how much damage Ad-Aware & Spybot S&D can cause - you're right, normal users shouldn't run them. But that doesn't change the fact that many will.
You're also right about the sponsor coming from LOP causing much of the distrust - but does that make it less worthy of that mistrust? Anything which conceals itself in the manner C2 Media products do is not going to be trusted by anyone who finds it.
My younger brother installed Plus!, just saying yes to everything. So I found LOP, & tried to rid myself of it (as previously detailed), etc. Also, even if you do read the licence, it's not all true: "Upon Installation of the Software and the Accessory Toolbar, any other toolbars currently visible will be deactivated, but may be manually reactivated" - This is only sometimes possible. "The Software may be removed through a variety of methods, including going to the start menu, selecting Control Panel, Add / Remove Programs, and then selecting the Software for removal." - if you've read this far, you know (ie. have been told) that the "software" is LOP, or possibly "Window Explorer." So having to remove Plus! is
not the idea given.
If you've already got LOP (one of the more evil versions -
), or if you get it afterwards, that one screws with the Plus! one, making it hard to delete (it happened to me).
And the shortcuts created are not to LOP, though that's where that take you. They're random garbage .JPG files on random garbage (nonexistant) sites. The homepages are the same. But they take you to lop.com (admittedly, that is in the license). The point here is the garbage - it gives an unknown URL, which sends you to LOP's chosen searchpage. But these shortcuts are named things like "Games," "Gambling," "Banking." There may be links to these on LOP's searchpage, but it's misleading.
This is a bit off topic, but support@lop.com tells you that you can uninstall any C2 Media product by going Help > About > Uninstall. Utter crap. None of them even
have Help menus.
Sorry if that was a bit jump-all-over-the-place-ish, but basically it comes to this - if you fiddle with it, or don't know where it came from, you're not going to have an easy time uninstalling it. Reinstalling with the sponsor etc.
does work, but
not always. And many people aren't going to think of that, or come here to find out. I only came to see if I could find out why Patchou's including it (which I did, & the reason is good enough for me).
Fred Greg.
/ –
