I don't understand why all these toolbars require the person installing them to "opt-out". I thought it was a well established principal that anything like this, as with email, required at least an opt-in (if not a double opt-in, as with most mailing lists). Every time I click to uncheck a box, I get more and more annoyed.

A consultant I work with told me the story the other day of a friend who was complaining that his computer was acting really slow, and when the guy looked at it, the person had no less than 26(!) "toolbars" installed. The portion of the screen actually showing the browser window was almost non-existent! ... I see lesser examples of this all the time, clients with five or six toolbars installed and enabled, and who don't understand why they are there or what they are supposed to do... they wind up installing a second, or a third browser, and simply abandoning the first, or just put up with it and complain about slow / balky computers and then happily pay me large sums of money to turn them off.

The whole "toolbar" phenomenon is just pointless, in my view... it is a "feature" that doesn't scale (there's only so much screen real-estate to go around), and whose various manifestations don't play well together.

People DO NOT UNDERSTAND or NOTICE the checkbox to not install the software. This type of "opt-out" functionality is abusive, and I don't see how it actually helps anyone (other than when people's search box defaults get changed)... all it does is annoy and distress the average consumer. Why would the Clamwin folks want to contribute to this?!? People have a hard time distinguishing between spyware and "toolbars", and legitimately so.

I don't object to the Clamwin folks wrapping as many toolbars and other widgets into the install as they want - as long as the user has to pro-active CHOOSE to install them, and understands what they are getting when they do. I'm not going to abandon the product if the managers go ahead with this... although the limits of it in a corporate environment are obvious: when users have Limited Accounts under XP, it doesn't run properly... combined this with the lack of centralized management, a migration to a closed-source commercial solution became imperative for one of my clients.

The poll here ...
https://www.clamwin.com/content/view/214/1/

... talks as if the install option will be checked by default.

Can you change the poll choice there to:

"Use it as usual but leave Ask Toolbar component de-selected for the installation"

The install option is checked by default and we can't make it otherwise unfortunately.
We tried to make the installation page as obvious as possible: