Yesterday I found and disabled Nero Scout, it's pretty straightforward. It is an indexing program, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it wasn't also linked to the larger scheme that JiK discussed. When I installed this Nero version I had to uncheck a great number of types of files that it wanted to manage. The one that I don't mind it taking over (as long as it keeps working) is to show the QuickTime files. Because I find QuickTime to be one of the pushiest and most annoying programs out there (it supplanted Real for this honor a couple of years ago after I finally managed to suppress the Real programming).

If we loop back to the beginning, there was an addon that started this inquiry. I don't know if the two problems are related, if the addon episode is something that Nero triggered.

SRS