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Originaly posted by me on the DSC forums:

Well Mechwarriors I ran in to a hell of a problem today. I installed TurboTax 2002 to get a head start on my taxes....
well after 2 hrs with tech support because their program would not launch (the product and ID that came with the stupid thing didnt work) I said screw it and went into Zonematch to blow stuff up with my buddies. My mech packs were gone. I rooted around on the Intuit (makers of TTax2002)web page under support and saw a issues with Safe-Cast and C-Dilla...our old friends. Needless to say it took a complete scrub of all MW4 and a total reinstall to get things back to normal..except my TTax program still is useless and completely un-installed. So I figured I'd drop a FYI on the community and have you all keep a eye out, I bet more and more software is going to be using this sludge so beware.

Does TT use Safecast/C-Dilla? Did you uninstall TT and that then uninstalled your C-Dilla portion of the mech paks???

Well hey, I am en canada Eh, we got other tax software here. but that being said it could stil be a issue. But dam that sucks, but don't microsoft say windows well make sure that only one thing well get installed not several. That it protects software BAHAAHHAHAHHAAH :lol:

Steel TTax uses Safe-Cast/C-dilla and as I'm seeing on the DSC thread I am not alone with this problem.....It does 2 things, it FUBAR's your mech pack C-Dilla files rendering the mechpacks invalid and is some how disables your cd-rom autoplay function (which I still cant get to work right)
I'm considering some sort of suit...not sure if I'm able but I will look into it.

See also: http://www.smithysanvil.com/topic_spyware.html for more information on C_Dilla and SafeCast.

For the Security Conscious (some might say, Paranoid) among us:

Be aware that if you have the Mech Packs installed, a folder (mine is called ~ef87a1, yours might be different) will appear in your Windows TEMP folder that contains an executable file called SCRfrsh.exe that runs something called ~ef7194 in the background whenever you play Mercs.

SCRfrsh.exe is a "32-bit SafeCast ToolKit", whatever that is. The folder goes away when you shut down Mercs, but the ~ef7194.tmp file remains. I'm guessing this is a Copy Protection deal, that likely checks to see if you're running illegal copies of the mech packs. But I have no idea why ~ef7194 wants to run the whole time you're playing Mercs. I use Ctrl-Alt-Del to shut it down.

I've double-clicked SCRfrsh.exe just to see what it would do. It brings up the splash screen from the Clan mech pack, then says please insert the CD into the CD drive and try again.

Also, when you connect to ZoneMatch, two cookies are set by Mercs. These cookies go into your USER.DAT file, which seems to me to be strange place for cookies.

TD

seems other folks have had similar problems:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techreview ... ture_x.htm

All,
Just a thought - return it if you can and use HR Block online... I moved to that from TT 2 years ago... It is all web interface, secured with SSL, and you files are backed up at HR Block...