Yesterday I decided to purchase a new and legit copy of Nero 8 because - I have to admit - I had been using a not so legal copy of Nero 6 before. Did you know that if you buy a new copy outright you'll be paying more than if you "upgrade" from an illegal copy? Yeah, I found it rather strange as well, so if you're thinking about getting yourself a (first) shiny new version of Nero, it may pay off to first hunt down a well known illegal registration code of Nero 6 or 7, and to supply that as the current version owned. The store knocked off 5 Euro from my total cost. Piracy pays?
Anyway, after downloading close to 180MB, I removed my old Nero 6 version and set out to install the new Nero 8. It started with asking me to reboot because "a previous installation has requested a reboot". Yet I hadn't seen any reboot requests, go figure. Ok, so I reboot the machine and go through a ton of configuration steps to finally get to a point where I have the full suite toned down to only install Nero Burning Rom. I don't need all the other crap, I just want to toast CD's.
Installation takes a couple of minutes and as I'm working on other things, suddenly a message pops up that the installation has finished but no modifications to my system were made?! Ok, let's reboot again. I give the installation another try, but this time it complains about being unable to load the shell access manager. WTF is that? I head over to the Nero support pages and somehow end up at an entry telling me to make sure automatic updates are enabled for windows XP. Right, as if that will have anything to do with it. I decide to give it a try so set out to open the services tab in the administrator tools in the configuration panel, and it won't load. A few curses, searches and registering of DLL's later, I am once again able to access my management console. I'm not blaming Nero for messing with my .msc files though. It's very possible that the issue somehow existed before but wasn't manifesting itself as I don't edit or configure services every day.
Another reboot, but before I do that, I grab the Nero General Clean tools, to get rid of all previous versions of the software, hoping it'll make the next install attempt more smooth. After once again rebooting, I run the cleaning tools, only to run into an error about not being able to access the OLE registry (if I recall correctly). No sweat, the cleaning continues and I'm asked to reboot again.
As I've been writing this post, the installation has been running in the back and it just popped up a message : Installation successful, please reboot your system. Will this be the final reboot? Will I finally be able to toast CD's again? Who knows...
Hits "Start" - "Shutdown" - "Restart"