Shoutbox

Firstly, I have to say good job to Patchou for his hard work in Messenger Plus and Messenger Plus Live. I've been using your software for approx. 2 years now.

However I am quite disappointed with the inclusion of the sponsor program.

I recently updated to the latest version that supports WLM 8.5. I figured I'd help out and install the sponsor program too, seeing as it is only adware. I disabled my anti-spyware programs to avoid being annoyed by them, and continued the install. About half-way through the installation, I receive a McAfee popup (McAfee VirusScan 11.0/2007) and it says that a trojan has been removed from my system.

???

The trojan's name was Downloader-BCM.

McAfee automatically removed the file. Upon reviewing the detection log, the starting process was iexplore.exe which made sense since I ran the installer right out of IE. No other websites were open at the time. The location of the program was in the Temp folder, which yet again makes sense because the sponsor program's silent installer would have extracted itself to the Temp folder.

I opened IE. Nothing. No trace of the sponsor program at all. I reinstalled Messenger Plus Live, and it yet again occured. I contacted McAfee with a link to your homepage and the name of the trojan, and they did confirm that the McAfee was not identifying a false-positive.

I had ran a virus scan a day before, and it was clean. However, I became slightly concerned and I ran another one. McAfee detected a keylogger. Connection? Seems possible.

I am a software developer, so I do know a thing or two about computers, and I'm curious why you are claming the sponsor to be adware when it contains a trojan?

no, the spnsor does not contain any trojans whatsoever. the only thing that happens is that once in a while you get a pop-up or two. false positives are also possible.

The sponsor program included in Messenger Plus! Live contains nothing that will harm your privacy. Testers had to go through the sponsor and ensure that it showed nothing that was inappropriate, and to insure it did nothing it shouldn't. The sponsor is perfectly safe to install. It may have been a false positive, but it may also have been something that came into your computer because your anti-virus was disabled.

Patchou, the creator of Messenger Plus! Live, would never endorse the installation of trojans or key loggers on his users computers. The trojan was either a false-positive, or came from somewhere else.

However, if you are unsure, uninstall Plus! completely and re-install it without the sponsor.

But the problem is that McAfee has already confirmed to me that this is not a false-positive, and that my anti-virus was enabled during the installation.

I disabled McAfee during the install, and re-enabled it after, and as soon as I launched IE it went crazy and started blocking Browser Helper Objects from initializing and deleted them.

I also monitored traffic in and out of my PC, and something started taking up my bandwith after the Messenger Plus install. Removed the sponsor, it stopped.

What is this downloading that's using approx. 100kb/s?

There's no way that this is just adware.

I can confirm you that there is absolutely no trojan or key logger in the sponsor program. You can look at it this way: the sponsor is here to generate a revenue and the only way to generate a revenue is through ads so there's no point in doing anything else than displaying popups. What was downloading may simply have been the sponsor program installing itself.

McAfee, like other similar products, likes to detect a lot of things as "critical" items to justify its presence on your system. You said it yourself: disabling it during the installation of the sponsor showed no problem and after it was restarted, it warned you about lots of things.

Time has taught me that it is a useless battle to fight so I'm sorry but that's all there is to it. I distribute an adware program and it's being detected as one of the worst trojan possible while so many other real threats are left undetected (precisely because threats usually do their best not to be detected at all to do their nasty business).