Advance and Be Mechanized

I don’t like Windows Media Player at all; it’s bloated but worst of all, it overrules without permission all my preferences for viewing media and encroaches itself in its operating system mother. Let’s see what happens if you try to remove this applications; it will defend itself, overriding how the operating system is suppose to work by taking advantage of a special consideration just made for them by Microsoft.

The reason I have the Windows Player at all is that my kid likes to go to disneychannel.com, nickjr.com and noggin.com (actually the Internet for him are those three sites) and at least one of them requires that you use Windows Player to watch its videos. What’s more, I had version 9 but it wouldn’t work; it had to be version 10 or nothing (geez!). So I upgraded to version 10 and he could watch his Dora the Explorer or whatever videos.

Now, I use InterVideo’s WinDVD to watch DVD movies; there’s nothing really special about this program but I like its simplicity: I can pause/restart the movie in the dark with the space bar and go to the main menu with one or two clicks, and that’s pretty much all the functionality that I ask in a movie viewer. Windows Media Player has some Ctrl+something for pausing (try finding that quickly without light) and don’t even ask me about the other gazillion controls and trying to connect to the Internet without permission to have some “experiences” or whatever. Anyways, after upgrading Windows Player, it just overrode all my previous preference settings and upon inserting a DVD it will just pop up without permission. It was really annoying; even if Windows would ask me what program I wanted for viewing the movie and after I selected WinDVD, it will not obey and the virus would show up.

At the end I learned that the way to solve this hijacking problem was to find the “Options” menu in Media Player and unselect the preference that it has for itself of being the default player for DVDs. This options menu is hidden in a new button at the top and right of the player that breaks all Windows conventions.

So I tried using the Windows setting to get rid of this problem; after all the applications are suppose to follow the operating system’s rules and not the other way around, right? Well, for Microsoft and its applications it’s the other way.

I went to the CD drive properties (for example: My Computer icon -> right click CD Drive) and in the AutoPlay tab, I selected the action to perform that I wanted: I hereby command you to Play with WinDVD in the case of video files. OK, let’s see if it works… No it doesn’t, it ignored my request and it’s still using “the virus” to open my DVDs.

Next I changed the file association preferences for Windows. To do this, I went to My Computer folder and in menu Tools -> Folder Options I chose the File Types tab. (This tab exists in some folders but not in others, another mystery). Then I went one by one thru the whole list and changed all the associations with Media Player to WinDVD. SO let’s see if Windows obeys itself… No it doesn’t. The preference of an application (Media Player) overrules again the settings of the operating system itself.

OK, third time’s a charm, so I’m going to uninstall Windows Media Player and see how it likes it. I went to Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs and chose the little bastard. Here comes a surprise, a confirmation dialog asks me if I want to revert to the previous version! It doesn’t offer any other option I may prefer, like “Kill you, kill all your ascendants and descendants and burn down all your houses”. This virus is really getting hard to kill. So I accepted this only choice and the mutant went back to its version 9 inception.

Now I can try and use the same tactic again to see if the bug will die. Hey, wait a minute, the bug doesn’t show up in the list of applications to uninstall. Hmmm. Oh, I remembered, Microsoft says that its player is an integral part of Windows (EU officials seem to disagree), like Internet Explorer. Interlude: I always found hilarious that they could affirm with a straight face that a user application like a browser that is at the top of the networking stack could be considered fundamental part of the operating system, when everybody knows that an operating system is basically the piece to interact between hardware and applications; composed of hardware drivers, file systems, memory and process management and that’s pretty much it, definitively not a high-level user application.

So in the “Add or Remove Programs” I chose “Add/Remove Windows Components” and then I unselected Windows Media Player. What eleven-hour trick is the virus going to pull now to protect itself? Well, I was going to find out soon: to uninstall the Media Player virus Windows will ask you for the installation disc. That’s right; you need an installation disc to uninstall.

And finally, the irrefutable proof that Windows Media Player is a virus: it reproduces itself upon being erased. Want to try? Go to the folder where the Media Player resides, in my case it’s Program Files\Windows Media Player. Now select the wmplayer.exe file and delete it (you have to close the player first or it will rightly complain that the file is being used). After a warning that the file is an executable, the program file is deleted. You can check that it went to the Recycle Bin. So far it’s standard behavior. Now wait a little or refresh the folder. The wmplayer.exe file reappears magically. WTF!? You can try deleting the file a few times and see multiple copies of it in the Recycle Bin, the fact is that Windows breaks its own rules and without any permission it will recreate this particular executable. You cannot fool the virus by renaming the file either. Of course don’t try this magic act with standard programs.

The same viral behavior is also present with Windows Messenger (for some reason I wasn’t able to repeat it now, who knows the things I’ve changed).