I am writing this post from Window Live Writer. It seems to be all over the blogosphere this morning, so I thought I would try.

Installations were a breeze, but you cannot specify an installation directory, so those of us who install programs on separate drives are SOL.

Setting up the blog was even easier than the installation. All you need to do is type in the URL and Windows Live Writer does the rest.

There are three interfaces for composing: two WYSIWYG, one HTML preview with the styles from your blog, and the last one, which resembles a simple word processor. The third interface is the classic HTML view. WLW also has preview and spell-check functions, which PFF, my preferred tool, does not.

I will update this post once I have published it to let you know if everything came across alright (unlike my post from Office 2007 Beta).

UPDATE: The worst thing that WLW did during the post was not to separate my paragraphs. It’s not too shabby.

UPDATE 2: The image uploads are a little wonky. For WordPress, it loads to the correct directory (i.e., uploads/2006/08), but there, it creates a sub-folder based on the post title and another folder to contain the thumbnail and the original image. This in itself is not a huge deal, but it makes these uploads inaccessible through the web admin panel.

I got a little tired of trying to send and receive files over IM using Trillian, so I gave in and installed Yahoo! Instant Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger again. I have had these programs installed for over three years, so I figured I would give it a shot.

I knew that there were going to be bundled products. Before even running YIM, I removed their helper program (that was a new one to me), the toolbar, and mail. It downloaded Flash and installed that as well. I deselected all of the add-on and preference options as I do not regularly use Yahoo! for anything other than instant messaging.

I started YIM and opened Firefox. The installer also installed the Yahoo! toolbar for Firefox, with Firefox’s growing market share that was not unexpected. I clicked on the toolbar to see if I would give it a shot (slim chance) and saw a remove this option. It intrigued me, so I clicked it. It opened a “Why is there a Yahoo! menu on the menu bar of my browser?” page.

After browsing through the help pages for a few minutes, I was disturbed. Nearly every problem referenced a corrupt profile. In the past two and a half years, I have only once had to create a new profile. I install and uninstall extensions on a weekly, if not daily, basis. It also mentions fixes in the about:config. While I have no problems making any of these changes, I find it disturbing that this stealth installation could corrupt the customizations I have worked so hard to make.