2009-02-23

I hate Vista!

Argh. The law of leaky abstractions at work. In a misguided attempt at making user's life easier Microsoft introduced aliases for "c:/program files" and other critical windows folders in Vista. This way localized versions of windows (e.g. "c:/programme" ) should be able to deal with badly written programs that have the install destination hardcoded and don't account for regional naming differences. It's an ugly hack to fix an ugly problem. However, the frickin fix doesn't even work. And when it fails it fails badly. I currently have a program I can neither uninstall nor reinstall (it's installer silently fails and rolls back). Worse: it isn't even possible to delete it manually. I can delete it from c:/programme but if I then copy a fresh install to the previous location I get a "cannot overwrite c:/program files/bla" error. Ok, try to do it with administrator privilidges in Safe mode: no deal! The fucking thing is undeletable. Now the best thing is that the program we are talking about is Mozy - my backup solution. It installs a service, a shell extension and a file system monitor. Things that are often characteristic for malware. I had tried Microsoft OneCare as an antivirus solution some weeks ago and that decided to interfere with mozy. Now although I have long since uninstalled OneCare mozy is still crippled - hence my rant above. Even better - OneCare cannot simply be installed like any normal piece of software, no, it forces you to uninstall any other AntiVir solution you may have already had and to top it of: you actually need to download a removal tool (!!!) in order to get rid of it again. This is fucking ridiculous. If it wasn't for Visual Studio, which is great and which I am using on a daily basis, this would have been the final straw for my emigration to linux. So fuck you Microsoft for providing me the disservice of this hidden "convenience" folder aliasing Anti-Feature.

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