Winamp Agent TSR

[ElmoTheGreat]

Sorry about the lack of clarity.

Yes, I'm already well-aware of RealPlayer agent as a cause of grief. Ever since it first popped up, I've made it a rule to disable it on every machine I've worked on. Not so much for the stealing of file associations, but just because it hogs resources. Anything that hogs resources affects stability. I've been doing that for the better part of a year now.

I know that Winamp agent doesn't hog resources like Real Player, but it still has effect. I was more concerned about the effect winampa.exe has on scandisk/defrag, than anything else. For this reason, I've added it to my list of "standard procedures" to disable the agent altogether. My last crusade was against using Windows Media Player 7 altogether. Talk about resource hogs...

Of course, I had to throw my two-cents in on the realnetworks forum. Even wrote a rather lengthy letter to the RNAdmin (although I doubt I'll get any response) about the battle that has insued for file-dominance. I just don't want to see the day when I have to refuse a customer service because he/she has a particular player installed on his/her machine. That just seems a bit ridiculous to me.

All that aside, I guess I'd have to say I'm just a performance junkie. That, and I like to have certain things happen automatically. I prefer to run defrag and scandisk as scheduled tasks, since my machines are online constantly. But I can't do that with the agent(s) running.

And you wouldn't believe how many calls I get saying: "Scandisk says it restarted 10 times... what do I do", or "defrag just sits there, and won't do anything". The pat response is: "Close everything except Explorer and Systray, and then run it". I just don't feel anybody should really have to do that.

I think the disabling problem is an issue in Windows ME, since the winampa.exe does seem to unload properly on my Win98 machines. Still, I don't see a need for it, as long as there's nothing competing for associations. I use Winamp for all audio files, and as long as I keep RP and WIMP out of the picture, I genrally don't have any problem with programs stealing their associations. And Windows ME was nice enough to include an "Open With" option to the right click menu. This has saved me alot of grief with the newbies already.

Now, if we could just get multiple file icons...

Ok I'll shut up now. :-)