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Annoying hitchhiker installs - A new type!

Arkaign

Arkaign

Lifer
Don't ya hate it when you're installing something, and they want to pack in XYZ toolbar or whatever, and you have to examine each choice carefully in order not to let it install the extra crap?

Well I'm deploying a new set of Toshiba i7 notebooks for a corporate client, and they have their own firewall and AV setup that they already use, so the preloaded Norton Internet Security 2011 is the first thing to get uninstalled.

During uninstallation, one of the first things it tries to do is MAKE YOU INSTALL A NORTON INTERNET TOOLBAR!

HAHHAHAHAHA What? I just told you I wanted to uninstall your POS product, and you think I want your toolbar?

Bleh, anyway ..

/rant
 
Wow, thats insane. I hate Java with its daily "updates" and it tries to install some toolbar too (Ask? Yahoo? I cant remember which one).
 
I used to see people have like 4 or 5 of them toolbars, take up 1/3 of the browser screen and they have no ideas what is going on. That and their brand new Toshiba laptop running Vista with 256M of memory was taking like 30 minutes just to boot to the desktop.
 
While we're on installation annoyances... Full screen installers piss me off. You know, the ones that have a giant advertising window that takes up the full monitor, but the window that's active is a standard small dialog :^S
 
...and then it automatically opens your web browser and shows a mini survey on why you're uninstalling their product. So you fill it out quickly and click send, and then get a server time-out error. D:
 
Hahaha thanks guys! I love that the thread has become the all-encompassing shared frustration with retarded install annoyances 🙂 I recognize each and every one of these so well. Just the other day I was walking someone through uninstalling something, and they weren't connected to the internet, and it popped open IE to a 'connection failed' screen 🙂 Had to calm the guy down, said you're just missing out on being spammed by the company.

I wonder if anyone has ever accepted so many toolbars that their browser window completely disappears 🙂 The worst I've seen in person is about 3/4 of the way from the top being obscured. The system was nearly unusable.
 
Well I think, in my limited experience with installations, at the core of 90% of the installers today is a Windows Installer MSI type. These are triggered by the main setup.exe program, which is the one that is calling out all of the hitchhiker TOOLbar installations.

So the key would be to run the MSI file manually, but usually you're locked out of doing that, gotta run setup.exe. But you can probably modify the MSI/generate a transform, right?
 
I hear ya, I deal with that every day. Some people have toolbars that take up nearly half the viewable area in the browser. Many of these toolbars are quite persistent and difficult to remove, lagging the computer to hell and trying to trick you into "disabling" the toolbar instead of removing it, not to mention all the popups to their website that happens during your attempts to get rid of the damn thing. That and the fact that removing the toolbar from the browser seldom ever actually uninstalls it from the system, making it liable to return whenever it feels like it. You actually have to go to Programs or Add/Remove and in some cases it's still impossible to remove it there.

The worst are the Vista systems with 1GB or less of RAM. I'm cringing right now thinking about how long it took just to get rid of some toolbars for those. Ugh. 99% of the XP computers I've run into have been much more usable. I occasionally run into a Vista system that isn't half bad, but it's rare.

Probably 9 out of 10 of the remote sessions I deal with, the user does have at least 1 toolbar, and seeing 2 or 3 is more common than just 1. ugh.
 
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