Yup, that’s what’s on screen this morning. I’ve been Updated, and there is this always-on-top message asking me to click on “Update”. Somehow or another, Viewpoint Media Player slipped past a fully-patched Win 2000 Pro setup with blocking in place on the autoplay settings. The product claims to send non-personally-identifiable information back to a server in order to run a toolbar, and online research claims that it hijacks search results. There’s no toolbar here, so I’ll guess I saw the very first message. AdAware and SpybotSD don’t identify it as a threat.

It doesn’t play fair. I can highlight the license agreement, but it won’t let me copy it. Same on a ‘Who is viewpoint?’ entry. Well, I did capture the main window as a jpg. As adware goes (if that’s all it is), it’s pretty tame. I had no trouble removing it by killing the process viewmgr.exe, running the Viewpoint uninstall, and cleaning out two related files from the temporary files folder. I’m curious how it got past my blocks.