God, there are some Microsoft products that I just hate.  ActiveX has got to be at the top of the list.  What idiot thought this was a good idea?  Linux just keeps looking better and better.

Yesterday, I sat down for a fun time playing some Counter Strike:S right?  Sure enough, I can see a listing of servers.  I'm getting a good 200 with pings below 100, which is what my filter is set at.  I join one that's around the 60 or so.  As soon as I join, my ping spikes up to 1000, it then varies back and forth from 120 back up to 600 and back down again.  It's like my pipe needs to take a fat shit, but it's constipated.

After an hour of thinking, maybe something is just downloading my bud Bill Pierce tells me to take a look at the registry (what another stupid idea).  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run contains programs that will run at startup.  Sure enough I have a LMU.exe line which is some kind of flaming bullshit that's reporting my fucking web surfing practices.  I delete this entry (I didn't even backup.  I was thinking, if this doesn't work, I'm formatting this whole bullshit machine), and then restart.

Magically everything's working peachy again.  My pings went immediately back down to the 70's or so.  I'm guessing I just got lucky.

Then sure enough today I want to run Windows Update.  Well, get this, you have to run the pos iexplorer browser to get that going (I'm usually using FireFox), a lo and behold, some other dickface has placed a porn search bar at the top of my screen.  Thankfully, MS finally updated their crap in SP2.  To disable the ActiveX controls you just Hit Tools->Manage Add-Ons and you get a list of ActiveX bullshit thats running on your machine.  I found a few "unregistered" ones, and immediately disabled them.  I restarted the browser, and presto no porn search (yeah my weener's mad at me).

If someone knows how to get CS:S working on Linux, along with MSSQL (I'm thinking WINE might be a winner here) I'd switch all three of my machines over to Linux.  I am just soo tired of the bull shit.