I betaed steam. I use ad-aware and spy sweeper daily. Sometimea a couple times a day. Almost never get anything but cookies. After installing steam, I ran both spy sweapers. Got a bunch of files and reg entries that steam installed. Yes, steam does install spyware.

lol making certain words an ad link. Now thats funny. I dont really mind it though. Its still a shit load better than pop-up. This is a 100 times less obstrusive. ;D

Come on, get with the program guys, this is old news. Valve responded to it immidiatly after it caused an uproar on the OGC forums. It's not at all spyware, it's caused by the user using FAT32 filesystem instead of NTFS. FAT32 doesn't delete the data that was in the place of the file before, so if the cache file isn't fully downloaded yet it will contain info from previous files on the disk, thus references to mp3 files and kazaa. Why the hell would Valve put in spyware anyway, everyone knows spyware sux0rs, it's not like we wouldn't notice it them putting it in. And besides, they'le be earning millions on it, imple ting spyware would just be moronic.

Its been awhile, but it installed Aureate files and reg entries. It had nothing to do with a chache or kazaa.

Funny i betatest steam from begining and there was NO registy entried or files ... why? because my machine is 2 years clear for ADware or Spybots and believe me, i reinstalled steam more than 10 times .. Maybe u should look on what else are You installing....

Didn't install anything else. Don't install every demo that comes down the line. My system is tweaked, monitered, scanned. I perform regular maintaince. I don't get or pass on viri or worms. Spyware doesn't last on my system. Steam has (or had, valve may have removed it) spyware. But I do know of and understand the phenomena of fanboi blindspots