Although I was finally up and about yesterday morning, I elected to spend the day updating my computer, running AV and spyware scans, defragging the hard drive… and playing Anno 1503 (which, by the way, is much fun).

Little did I know I was setting myself up for a heap load of problems, thanks to the RealPlayer updates. Why the problem? Because, as it turns out, I’d previously installed the RealPlayer 10.5 update installs advertising software on the sly. Now, I’m one of those weird people who actually read the EULA rather closely, and there was NO mention in it that RealPlayer’s “message center” would turn my laptop into an ad-delivery service whether I wanted that to happen or not.

Next thing I knew, my laptop had slowed to a crawl and I wound up having problems loading more than a handful of websites at a time. For someone who typically opens 3 dozen tabs at once, while also running a desktop blogging client and a feed reader, being reduced to 5 or 6 tabs and nothing else absolutely hamstrings my productivity. Also, it pisses me off.

So I updated to RealPlayer 11 thinking it would solve my problems. But did it? No, no it did not.

Turns out, RealPlayer 11 also installs the Rhapsody music engine… without warning that it does so. So why is that a problem? Well, because Rhapsody has been running malicious banner ads, so I naturally want to stay as far away from them as I wish I could stay from my mother-in-law.

Not that I’d have known Rhapsody was on my computer, mind you. RealPlayer didn’t actually tell me it was installing it (they’ve since changed that, I hear). I only learned about it because checking my Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel is part of my process when updating and disinfecting my computer.

So, I removed RealPlayer and then — here’s the kicker — had to remove Rhapsody separately. Then I had the pleasure of removing all of the spyware RealPlayer had installed on my laptop.

What the heck, I figured, while I’m removing things… so RealPlayer’s gone now, too. And meanwhile, StopBadware.org has labeled RealPlayer as “badware” for these practices, leading millions of other folks to take the same actions that I have.

Considering that StopBadware.org is largely funded by Google, I’d say that’s a Google Spank that RealPlayer not only deserves but ought to pay attention to if it hopes to stay in business.

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