This post taught me more about troubleshooting a faulting process in Windows than anything I've done in the last year or two.

Check the others posts from Mark, he teaches really useful debugging techniques for applications that are closed sourced or the code is to complex for the common power user.

Mark is Mr. Windows Debugging. He gave Microsoft hell with his Sysinternals company and publications until they bought him out.

"so the likely explanation was that the toolbar had come onto my system piggybacking on the installation of one of the several video-card stress testing and temperature profiling tools I used while overclocking the system."

So why would a browser toolbar component become part of a video-card/temperature tool bundle? Poor DLL tracking on the tool developer's part?

Most often than not, it's adware explicitly included in the installer by the software's creator to make a profit on shareware or freeware.

They usually have opt-outs, but the shadier ones do not - and you can legitimately click "next-next-next" and don't read about them and uncheck the button that installs it - that's what they're counting on.

If someone like Russinovich didn't see it, it was probably not opt-out.

Edit: here's some relevant info

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090518120035AA...

Google purportedly pays U$ 2 per install, I guess Yahoo! does the same

Thanks, that seems so obvious, now that you've explained it. I hadn't though about the advertising angle (silly me)...

Yahoo! toolbar in particular has moved to the status of virus, in my view. If you get "infected", it takes an expert to expunge it totally.

Craplets... It turns out that PC hardware is frequently sold at a loss today, and up to $100 of the cost is paid by craplets.

This stuff doesn't stop until people know what's installed, why, and what resources are being used.

I've enjoyed this and his previous debugging articles.

What I don't understand is why he didn't notice the toolbar itself, since he was actively using the browser when it crashed. Perhaps it was installed, but instructed to hide itself? (As opposed to being installed & disabled.)

Case closed - for him.

But if ever there was a blog post that explained why I don't use windows this was it!

You have some random out of date software application installed on your machine and don't even know it? And you are a highly technical person?

I can't even imagine what it's like for a non technical person.

This has nothing to do with windows. Nothing prevents software installed in Linux (or Os X) from installing crap Firefox (or safari, or whatever) extensions.

On a technical level you couldn't be more correct.

However, for various reasons – a mix of cultural and economic I suspect – ridiculous hidden installations and other software showing a coldly calculated contempt for the user are a fact of life while using Windows, and are very rare indeed on other platforms.

Nothing prevents it - true, but the normal method of installing packages is not like this. i.e. where every single file on the entire system is cataloged, and the exact program that installed it is known. Windows has nothing like this.

It has a unified place where programs can list themself, but the actual un-installation is up to the program. And it has no unified method of checking if programs are up to date.

How is this Windows fault? If you run an mpkg on OSX and something you didnt specifically ask for gets installed is it Apple's fault ?

Fault doesn't matter. The end result is what matters.

This is why the first thing you do with a windows machine -- assuming you like windows -- is wipe it and configure it yourself. Manufactures cannot be trusted with your configuration.

I read "The only software I generally install on my gaming systems are Microsoft Office and games" as indicating that he did install it himself. He believes the toolbar was a hidden payload in a system performance tool he installed.