EV> I would like to know what others think about my keeping these three   
    EV> PUPs on my computer as I think they are OK and nothing to worry about,   
    EV> even though McAfee says I should be worried about them.   
      
    BR> IMHO it sounds safe enough,    
      
   i'm of the same mind... i wouldn't worry about them...   
      
    BR> I have a few PuPs as well I had to "Allow" for Mcafee, though I    
    BR> use the MS product now. Any program that kills processes will get    
    BR> flagged as a pup I would imagine.   
      
   not only if it kills processes but remember that the executable code is   
   analysed for certain patterns... i've actually written DOS apps that were   
   flagged as PUPs... why? because they were self-modifying... they stored their   
   settings options within the exe instead of in a separate file...    
      
   i've also had some programs that shelled out to run others get flagged as a   
   PUP... this was due to the way they poked about in memory grabbing parts of   
   itself to write out to a swap file to free up as much memory as possible for   
   the sub program to operate... these are only two reasons why a program may be   
   listed as a PUP...    
      
   another one i've seen is the distributed.net dnetc.exe client listed as a   
   PUP... there were folk getting it onto machines that they didn't have   
   permission to put it on... they were doing this to build up their "farm" of   
   machines contributing work under their account... dnetc.exe got flagged as a   
   virus for a while because of this and then it was finally listed as a PUP...   
   if you are specifically running it, it is neither a virus nor unwanted ;)   
      
   )\/(ark   
      
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