Michael Bray's questions

Somehow my desktop system has been infected with Roxio Media Manager... I say it that way only because the MSI is continually executing on my system and I can't make it stop. The install never succeeds because it apparently needs some resource that it can't access for whatever reason. I can cancel the install, but a few minutes later it starts up on it's own again. The only thing I've found that works is to just leave the installer running in a failed mode, but that stops me from running any other MSI based installs or uninstalls. I think this started happening after I uninstalled a bunch of software that I don't use from my machine, but I'm not 100% sure.

I've checked everything I can think of but ... there are NO Roxio anythings in my list of Add/Remove programs, I've run MSCONFIG to check startup files and there's no sign there of anything Roxio related (that's active, anyway). I've disabled any/all services that have "Rox" anywhere in the title.

Is there anywhere else that I should check to try to figure out why this MSI is constantly trying to install itself? I'm nearing the point of wiping my machine and starting over from scratch.

I have a production MS SQL Server 2005 DB that I have recently become an "unintentional DB Admin" for... while poking around the settings for the DB I found that it has the default AutoGrow settings of 1MB. I've read (and generally believe) that this is not an appropriate setting - the DB is 14GB large. I'm willing (and likely) to change it, but my question is... If no one noticed it in all of the years we've been using it (especially users), why should I change it now? To put it another way, I guess I understand on a basic level why 1MB is too small - it's probably autogrowing often, perhaps daily or several times a day - but I'm thinking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

What specific justifications are there to increase the autogrow? Does it lock users out while autogrowing? Does it re-index? Does the DB do anything besides just add more disk space to the DB?

Basically, I don't care about fragmentation on the disk as a whole, I'm just curious about one file in particular... in my case, a SQL database and transaction log file. I'm looking for something that will provide very basic statistics - number of fragments, average fragement size, etc. I'm NOT looking for fragmentation statistics of the SQL data / indexes - I already know how to get that.

I have a VPN to my work which is quite fast... I Remote Desktop to my work PC, which is running a Microsoft Virtual PC. Working with the PC while I'm actually at work isn't too bad, but when I try to interact with it over the remote desktop, it is VERY slow to respond. Even simple typing can be slow, but screen painting and response time is painfully obvious.

Any suggestions to help speed it up?