Friday, January 05, 2007

Experiencing rogue upgrade to WMP 11

I felt frustrated tonight, because of the bloody, unintended, and uncontrolled upgrade to Windows Media Player 11. I intended, or I thought the system was intended, to install a small patch of Windows Media Player 10 as its update window notified, but the result was that a big WMP 11 was compulsively installed, even I tried to stop the installation and the upgrade program explicitly said it did not install the new version.

Windows Media Player 10/11's update is a malware, a rogueware, a rogue!

Let's see what happened one bye one:

1. A notification window pops up after Windows Media Player 10 starts. I am told that it should be an update.


2. WMP 10's update window persuades me to agree patching it. I am now told that it should be an upgrade, not an update.


3. It now becomes a setup. The setup wizard asks to exit WMP and all other programs. It seems to be a big upgrade?


4. Cheating continues! Windows is being upgraded with WMP 11, not WMP 10!

Specifically, a small setup loader of WMP 11 (not a small patch of WMP 10!) is first downloaded and installed. The loader next downloads the rest parts of WMP 11, though the window is still titled "Windows Media Player 10". There is no extracting action before the large setup file is downloaded, so its progress bar keeps still like the following for a long time. This window cannot be closed.


The 1 megabytes (MB) mentioned in the screenshot in step 2 is just for the setup loader of WMP 11. What's the real size of WMP 11? 25 MB! See the screenshot below. That's why I used the word "persuade".


5. "Windows Media Player 11" appears for the first time! From now, the installation is no longer under control.

You cannot close the following window. You cannot actually stop the installation. You may click the Cancel button and it subsequently shows "canceling updates", but the installation actually continues. Still cheating!


6. It claims that WMP 11 is an update, and the update is not installed. It lies.


7. It is a setup of WMP 11, not WMP 10. The setup is actually finished, not "not possible to complete Setup" as its screen says.


8. The setup program quits after unknowingly installing WMP 11.




10.



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