I purchased Deskscape a few days ago and, as is typical of Stardock, the product was not ready for a commercial purchase. Instead, as usual, Stardock expected the consumer to pay them to work for them providing debugging services, something that they should be clearly paying qualified personnel to do prior to offering the product for sale. Nonetheless, I purchased their product. In the first few days, I discovered several flaws in their product and opened a ticket on it. Today, much more serious issues have arisen! Now, their product is acting like a very serious viral infection.
Here's what happened. I was gone for a couple of hours this morning. Firefox and Google Chrome were both open on my desktop when I left, and neither had any page relating to Stardock or Deskscape open. When I came hope, Firefox had 15 pages with the URL https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/dream/ open. Chrome had more than 20 such pages. (I stopped counting at 20 and used Task Manager to close them all.( Neither I nor anyone in my household had opened these paes. After closing these pages, I found a link on the Stardock site to a tool to "purge" Deskscape. I downloaded it and ran it as an administrator as instructed to do. Apparently, that did little. The "Dream" wallpaper that I had on my desktop (Deep Space by Cyberslober) remained on my desktop by the animation stopped. It also launched the DeskScape 8 Configuration dialog box. The area where thumbnails of available wallpapers appeared totally white and there appeared to be no buttons, just white space. However, when I ran my mouse over those area, the contents displayed. Despite causing numerous explorer crashes in the process, it appears the Deskscape app is fully functional after running their "purge" utility as administrator. By the way all menu and context menu entries of DeskScape remain.
As I said, this is acting like a serious viral infection.Malwarebytes doesn't report any threats, but this virus may be too new for it to catch it. Has anyone else been caught up in this kind of activity on the part of this software? If so, what steps have you taken.
I use this computer very heavily in my business. Needless to say, if I experience any downtime at all (as I have already done), I will need to seek reimbursement from Stardock whether by request or legal action.
What a disgusting way to start my day!
