I was having trouble with Gnotella not staying connected so I thought I’d try LimeWire to see if I’d get any better results. I ran the installer and opted out of the optional stuff. I wasn’t too happy with the installer. It made connections to the Internet as part of the install process and didn’t really tell me what it was doing, but I was in a lazy sort of mood and just let it do what it wanted. When it was done I fired it up. It didn’t seem to be working very well and I didn’t like the interface. Nothing in particular, maybe it was just because it was different and I’m getting to old to keep climbing learning curves. Bottom line, I uninstalled it and went on to other things.

At least I thought I uninstalled it.

The next time I restarted my box Zone Alarm informed me that “JavaRun.exe” wanted to be a server. Since I didn’t know what JavaRun.exe was I said no and started investigating. Eventually I found a registry entry in the windows run key firing up JavaRun.exe with a bunch of switches for something called “TopMoxie.” Eventually I figured out that the LimeWire installer had set all that up and left it there after the uninstall.

I checked the LimeWire and TopMoxie websites and they both said that TopMoxie would be uninstalled with LimeWire. Since that didn’t happen I sent e-mail to LimeWire and TopMoxie asking them how to get rid of it. LimeWire never responded, but a droid from TopMoxie did. He said all I had to do was run the uninstaller from Add/Remove Programs and it would fix it. I replied telling him I had already done that, but TopMoxie was still there—with no uninstaller in Add/Remove.

He wrote back saying, in effect that was not possible. Miffed, I manually cleaned up my registry and deleted all the TopMoxie files. I also sent another e-mail to TopMoxie with a cc: to LimeWire explaining what I had to do to get my box cleaned up and asking for a straight forward explanation of exactly what happened during the install process. TopMoxie replied again, LimeWire didn’t. The response, from the same guy was once again to tell me that running the uninstaller via Add/Remove would clean it all up.

Never treat an unemployed geek like an idiot; he has way too much time to make you look silly.

I went through the entire install process again, this time using Ad-Aware and checking the registry at each step of the way to see exactly what happened. I also documented it all. I won’t bore you with the details. Needless to say the same thing happened again, but this time I also got to see Cydoor mutate a little so it could stay on my system even if I deleted the original installation directory.

I send my results to the TopMoxie fellow and he responded saying that because I stopped JavaRun.exe with Zone Alarm the install process never completed so everything did not get configured for a clean uninstall. He also said there was not much they could do about that, thanked me for the detailed analysis, and apologized for the inconvenience.

I told him the Ferengi Commerce Authority would be proud of TopMoxie’s business methods then cleaned up my system again and sent a e-mail to Ad-Aware asking them to add TopMoxie to their signature file.

After all that I tried Gnotella again and it worked like a charm. Go figure.

I need a job.