Sony Media Manager Installation solved

Had problems installing Sony Media Manager - for ACID 7 and Vegas 8. The help from Sony was pretty paltry - it was a long convoluted process that involved manually removing certain directories - real low-brow software engineering with an end user process that was much more like virus removal than software installation.

It always bombed on the install of SQL Server Express, so I started looking into that. I tried installing it separately and discovered that it wouldn't install correctly if the directory it is placed in was compressed or encrypted. Boing! I had compressed my hard drive.

Hey Sony! Maybe you haven't seen this much, but I can't have been the first to stumble across this problem. Try putting this is your installation problem FAQ!

Vundo infected my java file

I had a virtumonde spyware infection - it also showed up as Vundo. I tried all kinds of scanners to get rid of it, but it always came back after rebooting. Lots of people end up reformatting their hard drives and re-installing to get rid of this thing.

Turns out it was residing inside my Java runtime environment. I think it was pretty disappointing that the spyware scanning sites didn't talk about this because there are people that seem to be well aware of it and I have to believe the spyware scanners know this is a possibility too.

The solution was to remove all instances of Java from my system and install a fresh release and scan with a couple products. Spybot S&D and SuperAntiSpyware. In general, SAS seems to do a better job.

So far so good.