hi, this is a comment on the thread: http://www.computing.net/windowsme/wwwboard/forum/29443.html ===================== I installed Morpheus today on a relatively new windowssystem. When installing it, you explicitly agree with installing spyware. So you shouldn't blame anyone but yourself imho. When you watch the installationprocess closely, you can see that it says: "installing IPSentry" or something like that (it doesn't show up for a long time). For people who don't know yet, morpheus/kazaa/grokster are in essence the same programs. There are probably more clones. FYI, fsg3210.exe connects all the time to the internet after install. greets mattie

So,you're saying that although you know Morpheus is a "close relative" of Kazaa,that you installed it anyway?

yep if you know what you're doing, there is no problem and after all, it's "just" spyware. I tried to give the spyware proggies minimal freedom, but I found that I couldn't log on to the network. So then I got tired of it and uninstalled it right away :) and swept everything clean with adaware :) btw, I also saw that during morpheus' install, it copied a jvm.dll to my jre1.3 dir and set the date of this file to the date of the other files in this folder, so I couldn't see that it was added today. After uninstall it was removed. It also puts a abxreg.exe or something (don't remember exactly) in your jre-dir.

Well,I know what I'm doing,and I ain't doin' Kazza or the like.Any Kazaa-related/network sharing P2P software,and you're just asking for trouble.Spyware would be the least of my worries.

Even if you are comfortable giving up all of your privacy to the marketers of the world, there are several other problems with the spyware programs. Not the least of which is.... they will break windows and internet explorer. Spyware programs hook themselves onto the APIs (the underlying code) in internet explorer, so if they break, so does internet explorer. Since internet explorer and explorer (your desktop) are basically the same program... this can lead to random and completely frustarting error messages like: Explorer caused an invalid page fault in unknown. Iexplorer caused an invalid page fault in kernel32.dll ETC... Ad nausium... They will also completely suck up your bandwidth. If you are on a 56k modem, this can be quite noticable. It's not only the random pop ups, error messages, and junk email, do they have to break your computer too? It's a silly way to "market" anything in my opinion and will continue to try to find spyware free alternatives.

thekid: good boy ;) yada: this makes sense to me. I don't say I approve this kind of marketing strategy. I think if you don't allow those component installs for IE, your system is already a lot better of. On the other side, I don't use IE for browsing, so I don't have trouble with popups :) Today I installed Kazaa (long time no see :)), and I unchecked all ad/spyware when installing it. Kazaa works fine and I have the impression that I don't have any spyware running (I don't see any suspicious processes or connections through my firewall)? So I guess there is still a difference between Kazaa and Morpheus :) greets