Nero woes

[turk690]

I never liked nero much but I stuck with the last version 8 in case I needed anything at all from its bloatware. I was changing to new hardware and re-installed the lot, but upon finishing, a message promptly came up stating "third-party activation of some codecs used in nero is required; click to activate online". When I clicked, another message came up "sorry it seems you are installing nero on more than one PC so activation will be aborted" or somesuch.
Previous to nero, I had already installed other programs like Cineform Neo Scene & Power DVD 5.
After the aborted activation of nero, I found that where before I could transcode AVCHD with Neo Scene and watch DVDs with either Power DVD or WMP, now all these programs hang after loading the MPEG or AVC file to be played, and eventually close (if not requiring task manager intervention).
Stumped for a while, doing a clean uninstall of nero 8 (with a tool d/l from their site) restored the capabilities of Cineform, for example. A colleague's analysis is that when activation was aborted by nero, it also disabled along with it MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and ac3 codecs that WERE NOT installed by nero, vital to the programs that shut down when I attempted to use them.
If that's the case, then why & how does nero have to influence the legality of my use of those codecs it didn't install?
Now I know better and can understand a whole lot more some posters' scathing nero attacks.

[redwudz]

My guess is it may have to do with the order of install. If Nero was installed first, then Neo Scene and Power DVD may have worked properly. I suspect Nero of replacing or changing the merit of installed codecs similar to codec pack damage. I quit using Nero with V6.

[fritzi93]

Now I know better and can understand a whole lot more some posters' scathing nero attacks.

Yes, there's nothing like personal experience. :P It's not unusual to have to re-install some programs after uninstalling Nero. I suppose the Ahead website still has a Nero general clean tool, to remove any junk from a Nero uninstall (?)

[redwudz]

If I remember correctly, Nero has several versions of their 'Clean Tool' for different versions of Nero. Nero isn't bad, it just wants to do everything with video and usually fails to do some things well. Programs that want to do everything just don'tt work that well, IMHO. If I could DL just Nero Burning, I might use it. But ImageBurn does a better job of just burning, IMO, and it's freeware. The other Nero tools may be useful for you, but that's your decision.