Software Perils

A client recently had a bad experience with Net Nanny software. After uninstalling the product, ContentWatch errors started popping-up every time a user or a service accessed the Internet. With weather, news, IM, etc. widgets on the desktop the pop-ups were more than annoying.

We spent a lot of time trying to fix the issue. The Google machine was not much help. Against our better instincts, we called Net Nanny and got the fix. It turned out to be a fairly simple matter of resetting the Winsock on the machine. Instructions can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=299357.

Of course, this begs the questions:

• Why doesn't Net Nanny uninstall cleanly?
• Why don't the errors that pop up point to a Winsock problem?
• Why isn't there anything on Google that provides the solution?!

We always tell people to never install beta software. But who listens to us? My wife doesn't. Having received a new Android phone for Christmas, she recently installed the beta version of the Skype client. One result was that she could no longer answer incoming phone calls. The only way to fix it was to reload operating system, causing her to lose all her apps and data. Bummer! Lesson (re)learned? We'll see.