On my Windows 7 box this morning I received a new gift. A CPU burnin’ up piece of pseudo malware calling itself Macrovision Software Manager was chewing up 70% of my CPU cycles, doing who knows what. I’m not sure how it got on there, but it was not listed in the control panel software list, so I couldn’t remove it using the control panel. After spending this last weekend fixing my fiance’s computer because an idiot burnt up her hardrive with a faulty network installation that ran the harddrive all the time, I decided to get it off sooner rather than later. If you have the same issue:

1) Open up your task manager, and find the Macrovision processes on the Processes tab. Stop all of them.

2) Open windows explorer in adminstrator mode and go to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\InstallShield\UpdateService and delete the macrovision exe files in there. I found two

If you get an error saying you can’t delete them because they are being used by a process you didn’t stop all the processes you needed to in the task manager, so take another look at that.