Microsoft and the smoking gun...
So, there I am playing CounterStrike 1.6 at 02:00 and it starts lagging like Jar-Jar doing Shakespeare. It dawns on me that I have not changed the time for the Micro$oft Anti-Spyware Beta (MSAS) I installed about an hour ago.

Window'd over to the desktop and there it was. I clicked cancel and responded with 'YES' to be sure. Went back to CS and it was still a little choppy. Time to restart CS...but I will look on the internet first to see if there are any other complaints. Um, where's Firefox? There is now a white box in the quicklaunch bar and on the screen. Both yield the same "Program corrupted or missing" result. Time to reboot.

Reboot straight to scandisk - fixes a few clusters - deletes an index - and last, but not least deletes Firefox.exe.

So far, Firefox.exe is the only thing MSAS has borked. Just an accident or a smoking gun? Hmmm, last time I checked, I have 2341 files with .EXE extensions and 147329 files total.

So, the odds are 0.00043% for EXE's or 0.0000068% for any file.

Nice going Bill, real nice.

Now, I realize that this is a beta and future versions will undoubtedly be more descrete (and quiet) about such actions. We await that day with baited breath.

Is this an "honest OOPS" or a candidate for the "ObviousMan" award?

Let me know if you have had problems like this.

Thanks,
Mark