Thats a really bad pun for the title i will admit, however it is no better than the stupid piece of bloatware called Nero.

I just downloaded the demo so i could 'trial' it - 125mb! (which *doesnt* include the yahoo toolbar which they want you to install) Obviously i cringed a little, but you have to admit that its a good burning application - so i pressed onwards. Running the install i found that Nero is like a bad guest at a party, bringing along its who graduating class and several visitors from spain - in the form of random unwanted applications for just about everything you can imagine. Infact i'm very suprised they didnt include a browser, given that it installed media player, a media server, two different music mixer slash editors, dvd transcoder, local filesystem searcher, tv recorder, help wizard, back up tool, phot wizard and a whole pile of little tools and then promptly tried to reassociate every file with them (fortunately it gave you the option to "uncheck all").

A quick visit to Add or Remove Programs, shows nero weighing in at 393megs. Nearly four hundred megs to burn a cd???? I went in and pruned very hard and got down to just nero bruning rom, nero express (doesnt seem removable) and some little associated tools and doco (although AoRP still shows ~400 megs worth).

Im just in shock as to how badly things are bloating out. People hassle OpenOffice for bloatage - they need to visit nero! Anyway so i just wanted to have a little rant about how stupidly large these things are getting, and how badly they are leaning unsuspecting people over then having their way with them.

On a side note, I updated my work machine to Office 2k3 today (we finally updated our licenses) and suprisingly, outlook is actually better as is office in general, than Office 2000. Things actually start faster as well - suprising for MS.