by Ben Tudor on April 26, 2007
Quite recently, I made the mistake of installing a bunch of Creative Labs software to support a Zen music player. I'd borrowed a Zen V Plus - a tiny, teeny, little music player, in order to write a feature about using media players in Vista, as my ancient first generation iPod wouldn't work. As it turns out, by the way, it's much easier to use the Zen in Vista than it is to use in XP.
Anyway, out of curiosity, I loaded the supporting software that came with the Zen onto the XP computer I use for work. The software supplied by Creative is, well, OK. It's not a patch on iTunes or Windows Media Player, and there's lots of different programs that do lots of different things. After a couple of attempts, I stopped using it.
All was well and good, until I found a charming dialogue box opened on the desktop inviting me to register my new Creative product. I hadn't bought the Zen, and I certainly didn't feel obliged to register it - and my personal details - with Creative. Clicking on the close button in the top right hand corner takes me directly through to another box, with only 'OK' as an option.
Looking around on the web, it seems that a few other people have the same problem. It's proving impossible to kill the process that pops up these boxes - InetReg.exe - and I'm having trouble actually deleting the software itself, because it's always running when Windows runs. Closing it down from the Windows task Manager doesn't work - it simply relaunches.
I didn't expect a company like Creative to provide annoying software, frankly. There's no way of saying that I don't want to register - I simply don't have the option of telling the program to push off.
One way of getting around it, of course, is to put all kinds of random data into the form, and then hit send. The company gets random gobbldegook, and hopefully the annoying registration popup goes away and doesn't come back.
But of course, that's far too simple. When I tried to do this just now, the program crashed. Even worse, it reopened immediately, so I couldn't even delete the program.
I'm not totally sure what Creative is trying to do with this software. However, the end result, for me at least, is to cause considerable grumpiness and make the user wonder why they bothered using such an annoying product in the first place.
