Okay. So in a bout of what I assume was madness, I decided to finally end my support of Square-Enix via payments for FFXI (no, this part wasn't the madness) and then uninstall it and finally rinse Asgard of Spyware and viruses (there's the madness). Alright, I managed to cancel my content ID after 40 minutes of playing the guessing game. Turns out they wanted the assigned number that I started with, which I guess makes sense in retrospect, but it's been a fair bit of time since I first installed the thing. With that done, I tried to run the uninstall of the program, bad idea. It took approximately 15 minutes to move 1%, so I went in and started manually deleting files. Not the best way to do thing admittedly, but I was going to be rid of it one way or another. So, I got some of it, unfortunately the rom folders (which are apparently just filled with folders filled with .DAT files) started causing problems. Namely "Error Cannot Delete File (cyclic data error)", which is something I've never even heard of before, so I moved on, figuring it was just the oddball file. No such luck, every few folders has one of these, and considering that Norton scans close to 2 million files going through this directory, I don't think I want to go through and hand delete them individually, I think I'll just have to force delete them through Command Prompt later. So, anyways, in a bout of desperation, I tried the uninstall option again. 30 minutes later it was 20% done, another 10 minutes past that and it was 14%, 5 minutes after it was 9%. So, I let it sit, and it ran into another error and undid everything it had done, reached the beginning again and pulled a critical Windows error. At this point, I have to confess, that I have no clue how Square-Enix did it. How the fsck did they take a 4 disc game (plus one for the PlayOnline view, plus one for the expansion) that comes to a grand total of roughly 1.5 gigs, that takes approximately 2 hours to install, plus 3 hours of patching (on Tech's connection) runs into all kinds of critical malfunctions when trying anything like uninstalling, and make it into a Playstation 2 game? I mean, that kind of transformation is something I'd imagine as taking several virgin sacrafices in a dark voodoo ritual.

Alright so with that not quite out of the way. I downloaded and ran Ad-aware, quashing 206 files, registries, and folders worth of dataminers and tracker, unsuprising and unworrying. However, what does bother me is that Norton Auto-Update is giving me a "Selected Groups Aborted with no Text" as to its attempts to update my virus definations, which were apparently last updated sometime in July of last year(!!). So, I still appear to have a fair amount of work ahead of me.

That aside, as a passing note to Hackers/Virus makers of the world. If your program/method is going to install fake files onto someone's computer, be reasonable. 1) Don't choose something so blatently out of place like a Microsoft file that comes as a package somewhere other than said package. 2) Make it blend in. Uncapitalized folder names are kinda a dead giveaway. Everything comes with capital letters unless it's a homebrew creation like OpenRPG. 3) Give it a reasonable name. No one would ever have an extra Microsoft Frontpage folder or worse yet, Xerox. Why the hell would a Xeros program be on someone's computer, or moreover, why would it be in Program Files?! Okay script kiddies? Get you acts together and be reasonable with these things.