Had a support call from a client yesterday. All of a sudden:

- Home page in all installed browsers was changed and could not be changed back
- Antivirus protection was set to something he didn't recognize, and changes were disabled
- He kept getting popup notifications in the System Tray, that problems were detected on his computer and the System Tray application could "fix them"

Turned out he installed an Adobe Acrobat Reader update without un-checking the default opted-in extra garbage:

- Home pages were all changed to Yahoo!
- Norton 360 (trial? who knows) was installed, Windows Defender disabled and ability to change security software settings was disabled
- The popup was apparently "Norton One Stop", whatever that is (hadn't heard of it before)

I find it incredible that the default installation of an Adobe Acrobat Reader update makes changes to a user's machine that are indistinguishable from a malware attack. This is no longer merely annoying, it's costing real people real time and money to mitigate.

It's a shame Adobe has to be considered the gold standard for PDF handling. Alternatives such as Foxit are looking more attractive all the time.