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NBC Direct Uninstallation wont complete

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:19:08 +0000

NBC Direct is a software that will be installed on your computer if you want to watch the videos offered at the NBC Direct website. Before NBC Direct is installed the Open Case Media Agent is installed on your system as well which is used for distributing content and managing rights.

I did install the service to be able to write about it and ran into a problem when I tried to uninstall NBC Direct. The uninstallation would hang and I had to press cancel to stop it. There was no progress and no information why it would not complete the uninstallation of NBC Direct.

My feeling was that it had something to do with the Open Case Media Agent service that was running on my system and I decided to stop the service. After stopping the service I tried to uninstall NBC Direct again and it completed the uninstallation in no time.

My conclusion would be to uninstall (using the normal Windows Add / Remove Programs menu for instance) the components the following way:

Uninstall the Open Case Media Agent first. This gets rid of the service running in the background all the time.
After this uninstall NBC Direct which will now uninstall completely.

What is MediaAgent.exe ?

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 08:05:53 +0000

I spotted a huge process in my task manager today called MediaAgent.exe which used roughly 30 Megabytes of RAM. A quick check revealed that the process belonged to a OpenCASE Media Agent which I was not aware to have installed after all. My first fears that it was some sort of trojan, virus or spyware that managed to sneak into my system thankfully did not turn out to be true.

The only application that I did install the other day was NBC Direct. A quick check of the NBC Direct FAQ revealed that they were indeed using the OpenCASE Media Agent “that manages your video downloads and monitors for any updates and/or new content to be downloaded”.

This means that this thirty Megabyte process MediaAgent.exe is wasting RAM and CPU cycles for doing nothing most of the time. I can understand that this process is started when starting NBC Direct but not if NBC Direct is not running at all.

The OpenCase Media Agent is a service that is installed with NBC Direct in Windows that is automatically started when Windows starts. The option would be to either disable the service which would surely make NBC Direct stop working or uninstall both NBC Direct and the OpenCase Media Agent to get rid of it.