Don't install the WinDVD8 Trial

[convergent]

I'm on a major life tangent to build a media streaming setup in my house. It all started when I bought an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ to store all my image libraries. But the ReadyNAS has a lot of streaming capability, and looking through forums to get things setup, the geek in me popped out. That is a whole other story that I'll probably chronicle here when I'm done... but along the path I made the mistake of installing the WinDVD8 trial. Actually I inadvertantly installed another Intervideo product first... I thought it was a media player, but it was instead a media server which I don't need.

So I installed WinDVD, but actually never used it. It took forever to install, and I was imagining that it was wrapping itself into the bowels of my system. I decided to remove it a couple days after installing. I had made some changes to my network drives, but all letters were still the same so no problem should have come from there. When I tried to remove it from the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs, it promptly got an error. The error mentioned an invalid drive letter... however the letter it said was bad was not. The drive had been replaced, but was a mirror of the original. It made no sense.

I then tried reinstalling it thinking that would fix the problem. Not so... it got the same error. So, I called Intervideo support. I was getting the idea they wouldn't be help when the goofy phone tree took so long to reach a person... and the website is fairly illusive about how to reach them. When I talked to a person, I explained my person and was told that they don't offer support for trial versions. ;) OK, I would think that trial customers would be ones you'd want to treat well.... if you cared if they bought the product. After some prodding, he "asked around" and came back with the brainstorm that I try using System Restore. Ordinarilly this wouldn't have been a bad idea, but I had installed and changed a bunch of crap on my system after I installed this trial. I really didn't want to redo all of that stuff.

So, time to get out the big gun... RegEdit. I spent a half hour deleting keys. This thing was ALL over the place. Some of the keys had to be modified as they were things that it took over, that needed to be moved back to my other DVD running programs. About half way through doing it, something popped up and tried to start reinstalling it.... NEVER seen that before. It was like a virus or something.... it knew I was trying to kill it and was trying to stop me.

I think I got it all out, and I can run DVDs and all is good. My problem is that some rogue process keeps triggering something that tries to run InstallShield again. Hopefully I can track it down, as I really don't want to roll back with System Restore.

Advice... stay was from WinDVD.

[convergent]

OK, it looks like that thing may have been unrelated. A couple days ago I had a rouge "agent.exe" that the firewall kept catching trying to talk to the outside world... culprit was InstallShield. Now this thing... "isuspm.exe" was trying to do a loop of installing something. Research on both rated them as a big unnecessary nusance and resource hog. InstallShield now seems to be moving towards the spyware/virus status. I disabled it using the information here... http://www.file.net/process/isuspm.exe.html .

We wonder why Windows XP slowly gets slower and slower over time... its all this crap that gets dumped into it.

[zacker]

try "Hijack this" you run the app and copy the codes and let the guys on the forum have a look and they tell you what to keep and what to kill, worked for me like a charm!

[TomNanos]

Mike-

Try regclean. You can get it here:

http://www.download.com/3000-2094-881470.html

We use it at work to clean up after messy errant uninstalls. It's quick & dirty, but usually gets the job done (and is written by Microsoft). I haven't used it on XP, but I don't see why it won't work. Of course, back up your registry first... ;)

-Tom

[convergent]

Well, I found a gem of a freeware program tonight called EasyClean... http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ . I managed to get rid of 22GB worth of crap from my C: drive that was giving me full messages yesterday. It has a lot of nifty tools. I am running the beta of the latest version. I haven't tried its register cleanup tools yet. I've been really working my desktop system over tonight. I didn't realize that this machine wasn't running Windows Updater... 59 security patches later! Also update MS Office, and installing Ghost now to backup this puppy. I'm out of control!

[convergent]

Just not my night. It turns out that that error that was giving WinDVD fits... invalid drive or some fool thing... gave me problems on another app. I ended up concluding that for some reason it was getting bent out of shape because of the location of My Documents on a share. Its been like that for a year, but I recently replaced the NAS... but everything else was the same, including the share being cloned... go figure. I moved My Documents back to a local drive (not C:) and it solved the problem.

Fix one problem, find another. I'm re-Ghosting my work laptop because in the NAS replacement, I figured it was easier to scrap the backup and just re-do it... rather than moving it from the old NAS to the new. Well wouldn't you know that a couple hours into the full backup, it craps out with a disk error on the laptop. Umm... that's the reason we do backups, right? It also could explain the series of "Blue Screen Of Death" incidents I had yesterday on that machine. Well, I am now having to run the lengthy CHKDSK with repair option, and it did find 5 unreadable sectors. Hopefully it will get them all fixed up. I'm 30 minutes into that, and its only at 30% of 2 of 5 stages... Ughh... I may give up on it for tonight, and pick it up on Monday.