I had a work trip out to Bendigo yesterday, and since my brother's place (in Shepparton) is on the way, I thought I'd pop in for a visit.

While there, I did the obligatory family-IT-support thing and took a look at his PC. It's a relatively new Dell desktop PC running Vista Home Basic. As I've said before, I always spend an hour or two stripping off all the crud that Dell pre-installs when I get a machine from them, and Ben's PC was no exception. When I gave it to him it was running the bare minimum that he needed.

The first thing I noticed was that somehow Google Toolbar had managed to reinstall itself. The second thing I noticed were some new desktop icons - one for Adobe Acrobat Reader, and another for some sort of Adobe photo album software.

Ben informed me that he'd been sent a PDF file and a link to download the reader. The other stuff must have been installed by default when he downloaded and installed the reader.

What is it with software developers nowadays and their bloatware installations? Is it not enough that a user installs Adobe Acrobat Reader without also installing Google Toolbar and some superfluous photo album software? What's in it for you, Adobe, to clutter your users' machines with this crap?

It's not limited to the corporate world, either. I updated to the latest DivX codec the other day, and the installation actually prompted me to install FireFox and the Google Toolbar!!! WTF? All I want is a freaking video codec and you're going to install an entire new browser onto my system? And this option was checked by default!!!

So Adobe Reader is no longer on Ben's machine. I replaced it with Foxit Reader which is a much better piece of software.

The other problem Ben has had is a very strange one. He can't download files from microsoft.com's download site. For example, he visits the page for the Excel Viewer and clicks the "Download" button. A small pop-up window appears, which should be where the download begins from. That pop-up ends up showing a "page cannot be displayed" error, while the original browser window navigates to the "thanks for downloading" page.

I signed in as myself and tried it, and that's where I saw a really scary message. When I clicked on the "Download" button, IE prompted me to open a new window in non-protected mode because "igfxsrvc.exe" requires it. What the hell? I searched on the net for this particular executable, and it's supposed to be a video driver for the Intel chipset on that machine. No doubt some sort of malware has installed itself onto his machine with that filename. He really needs to get some sort of malware protection other than the built-in Windows Defender.

Family IT support, huh? Fun for the whole family except for the IT guy. :)