Freebie Software Can Cost Too Much

Today I have had a revelation about a "free" software that I really find useful.  But after such a painful ordeal, I have to get the word out. and posted a review on Sofpedia.   I'm also covering the software here just in case I can spare someone else the torture that I endured which lasted for weeks.

How excruciating?  Just follow this sequence closely - apparently the devil is in the details applies here.   This one just so happens to be one of the most invasive freebies that I've ever encountered.  When I first installed CutePDF it slipped my attention that it was going to overwrite my default search in favor of Ask.com and affect my browser toolbar too. Within minutes I  simply uninstalled the Ask.com app in Add/Remove Programs. 

Uninstall didn't clean this up, it actually made it much worse.  Simply put, CutePDF, isn't.
As a professional software consultant, I was vexed with operating system hang ups and software stalls.  With a relatively sophisticated system, I persevered.  Whatever the problem was despite some rather lengthy discovery procedures, I couldn't heal the machine.   Sure at one point  I noticed lingering folder called Ask.com.  Either I found it in the Program Files or Program Data, I can't remember which, but that was soon pushed into Recycle Bin.  


You would think that would be the end of it --- But nooooo, it just compounded my daily nightmares. 

Each boot up, was an exercise in patience.  Since it was looking for code that didn't exist, my CPU would hang then get dragged down to a painful crawl.  Sure, I'm fanatical about  performing tune-ups and emptying temp files, yet was plagued with the most sludgiest performance in recent memory.  It  continued even after I upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2012.  I was beginning to think maybe I had picked up a really big nasty.

Mind you I run radical, "up the kazoo" protection the likes of Windows Defender, MalwarerBytes, aforementioned Norton Anti-Virus, NoScript on Firefox, plus redundant firewall shields up.  But this problem was so grievous I prepared for the ordeal to nuke/repave.  BTW, the event viewer wasn't helpful to diagnosis this problem since it ran only identified as a CLSID and it used an innocuous software tool to check for updates. 

Finally, after more than two weeks of torture, today I discovered that CutePDF had surreptitiously set up in Task Scheduler not one but two daily scheduled events, one to check for Ask.com toolbar upgrades to run in the background the other of questionable purpose pointing to temp files that no longer existed.  If either of these updates failed, they would continue to run hourly, for three days.  Unless of course you rebooted daily in which case it wouldn't quit !  [insert pig sound here -- SUUUEEEE!]

Honestly the only reason I gave it any stars at all in my Softpedia review is that, after putting me through all of that, I'm now able to use CutePDF unimpeded.  Yeah, we'll see if this hold true after I reboot. 


Just saying -- this cutie pie "gotcha" CutePDF cost me hundreds of dollars of down time, weeks of frustration, requiring extreme diligence to locate the problem and oh --   just a few extra minutes to resolve. 

  Like I'm just saying --- word to the wise.

Microsoft reported in May 2011, one in 14 downloads
from the Internet may now contain malware code, cited in the
Wall Street Journal