This is part one of a three-part story. If you haven't read part one and part two yet, you should do that first.
At this point I'm past my threshold for endurance. Shoddy installer allows a partial install that borks my ability to establish an IP, incessant messages popping up during normal computer use, a driver causes blue screens due to some unknown interaction with other software, and (as I was about to find out), misconfigured uninstaller.
Mini-Rant: The second point you might quibble over, as almost all firewall software does this. But DSA2 takes it to the irritating extreme: it also pops up to ask you if you really want to run this program, every time a new process spawns that it doesn't know about. You can turn it off, and I did, but this mentality bothers me. As a software developer myself, I've seen message boxes get ignored, and more of them is not the answer. More messages to the user means more familiarity for the user in clicking No, or Cancel, or "whatever makes it go away". This is really a separate rant, on UI design, but yet it's relevant here. My own mother, who is hardly a technophobe yet also not the most tech savvy, has complained to me about this very thing, both when I installed Spybot's TeaTimer (which watches for important registry changes and asks you to allow/block them) and when I enabled her firewall software. Both times she told me she found herself just allowing everything through, because she didn't know what any of it was (and she's not going to punch each one of them into a search engine--but nevermind that; DSA2 doesn't give you time for that. You have 30 seconds to press a button. Geez.)
So it came time to uninstall DSA2. This should be the easiest part, shouldn't it? I fire up MyUninstaller again and lo, it isn't in the list. I search (yes, you can search for text in the list, one of many novelties Microsoft can't be bothered to give you in Add/Remove Programs) for Dynamic, and then for Privacyware. Nada. I look in the Start menu. Nope! I look for the option in the program. Nuh-uh. I google "Dynamic Security Agent uninstall" (without the quotes; this turns up results for most programs, particularly if people don't like them and want to get rid of them, which I would imagine DSA2 causing). Nothing useful. On a lark, I decide to fire up Add/Remove Programs, and there it is in the list, under Dynamic Security Agent.
Now I've been using MyUninstaller for quite some time, and this is the first time I've ever seen it fail to see something Add/Remove Programs saw. What non-standard way could they have registered their uninstaller that it would show up in one but not the other? You might think this indicates a bug in MyInstaller, not DSA2, but I'm inclined to lean the other way. It's proven in so many ways (including a shoddy installer) that it doesn't play nice with other applications or, in fact, the operating system, so why should it start now? Due mostly to the fact that I've never seen this happen before and I, as previously mentioned, install and uninstall a lot of software regularly, I'm going to say this one is on DSA2 as well.
I wish I had the perseverance to hunt down the "right" way and see how that deviates from DSA2's way; or to hunt down what exactly caused the BSOD that I kept getting before. But let's be honest. They don't pay me to debug their software. It's sufficient, for the purposes of this blog post, to say it didn't work for me. It didn't work for me and it wasted 5 hours of my time as it was, and I highly do NOT recommend this software. To anyone. I don't understand how it's rated so highly by users on Download.com, but I'm publishing my experiences with it, with error messages and such intact, so that maybe someone else googling them will have better luck than I did at figuring out what's wrong. Dynamic Security Agent is wrong. Get rid of it. I don't say that lightly. I very very nearly came to the point where I was going to throw my hands in the air and just go ahead and reinstall Windows. You shouldn't need a degree in Computer Science to clean up the mess a program makes, particularly a program you downloaded to prevent messes from happening on your computer.
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