I know there are already a bunch of topics on this, but I wanted to add my own comments. Maybe if enough people speak out, this annoying practice will end.
First off, I've never particularly liked ImgBurn myself. I find it counter-intuitive to use. Why are there separate buttons for adding files and directories? Every other program lets you select either from the same function. Why do you need to click on the calculator to total up the size when every other burning program does it automatically? Why does clicking on the red cancel/abort button during a burn do absolutely nothing? Go ahead and click it at the start of a burn and it just continues to burn. By the time I forced a reboot to stop it, it had burned half the disc.
Anyway, I decided to install ImgBurn so that I could help a friend. She claims that suddenly nothing on her system will burn properly, so I recommended that she try ImgBurn. It was the only free burning program that I could think of and I'd tried it a few years ago. I didn't realize that it now comes bundled with malware.
Yes, I said malware. That's what you call software that runs without permission, puts crap on your system without permission and provides no way to remove it.
After my firewall blocked the installer from connecting to the net, I came here and searched the forum. Naturally, I did NOT install the toolbar, (does anyone ever install these things?), but I wanted to see what else it might have done to my system. After reading some of the other messages, I searched my system and sure enough, there was a DLL file sitting in the Temp dir, plus several registry entries for the Ask Toolbar, which I had to manually delete, since none of the registry cleaners I tried listed them as invalid entries.
If you want to bundle crap with your software, that's your business, however, said crap has absolutely no right wahtsoever to run on a user's system BEFORE they allow it by leaving the boxes checked. The fact that it runs without asing permission and then modifies the registry makes it malware.
Until you stop bundling malware with your software, I will not only not recommend it to anyone else, I will recommend that they AVOID it, as I do with the ever growing list of programs that include this crap.
