said by upb:said by bangaroo:This does not sound good. I am surprised no one else noticed all these changes, especially the hosts file. I'll be extra watchful if I every try SE.
It seems to be more complicated than I thought. The SE installer appears to use some kind of heuristic to examine the configuration files (hosts, win.ini, etc.) before it makes any changes to them. It appears that the installer is looking for modifications that may have been made by malware.
I have SE running on a desktop machine, and upon taking a closer look at that machine, it could be seen that SE left all of the configuration files unmolested. The processes which were disabled remained disabled. However, the XP Pro installation was a new one, and there weren't many apps on the machine. My wife's laptop, by way of comparison, has had many, many applications installed over its four year life.
Other people have reported that the hosts file can be modified (Steve Gipson of »
grc.com reported it during a Security Now netcast a few weeks ago), so I'm not alone in some of these observations. It's too bad that the installer is silent about modifying the files when it decides to do so. The resulting surprises can be unpleasant.
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