Although I have no love for RealNetworks, calling their software
malware is perhaps a bit extreme, no? So their uninstaller left behind
a player engine...I wonder how much other software would qualify as
"malware" based on that behavior alone?
As for the "message center" component complaint, someone has been
asleep at the switch if they thought this was a new feature in
RealPlayer. The last time I used RealPlayer--back in the late 90s/
early 2000s--it definitely had a "message center" that was
periodically annoying when software updates came out. It was a little
blue icon that periodically "gleamed" yellow in the system tray.
All of these things said, I do wish that RealNetworks would get their
act straightened out. I've compared their streaming video to that of
Quicktime and Windows Media...and on that one front, Real does very
well against the competition.
You do have to go down all the options and uncheck all the
update and information lists, and the free google search bar
of course. But it's very nicely behaved otherwise, once you
do that.
And it displaces enough other player software so that you probably
avoid worse programs.
Their (free) realproducer is what I use to encode audio, and the resulting
files are smaller than mp3 for the same quality. And it runs from
the command line.
-- rhhardin@mindspring.com
Real Player is malware.. 
Linear Mode
