Roxio EZCD Creator started life as a random series of programmer's tools at Adaptec, the company which made most of the CD/DVD and SCSI controller boards. Some marketing genius saw that these might be useful to customers, but instead of leaking them onto the web site as unsupported tools, they shoved them into an installation package and sold them as a shrink-wrapped item. They went through four generations of this before the company figured they could make a lot more $$ for the stockholders by spinning off a software company (Adaptec is a hardware company) and calling it Roxio. Upgrading from Adaptec 4 to Roxio 5 was guaranteed to do something nasty to your PC.
Somehow, the Mac software, Toaster, didn't have this problem.
Roxio 5 was essentially Adaptec 4 with a new installer and an orange (instead of green) logo.
Roxio 6 was supposed to make all things conform to the new company's standards, but didn't. Roxio bought a company called MGI which made a very expensive and buggy video capture/editing program named VideoWave. Roxio 7 and up includes this piece 'o' crap. I can call it that - I was its first support engineer at Roxio.
Each rev added more and more crap, like their backup-to-CD app - and it didn't help that Microsoft chose the Roxio engine for its built-in CD burning and CD-looks-like-a-floppy-drive app, because installing one Roxio on top of another munges the CD/DVD drivers.
Sonic bought Roxio, and there was some hope for 9 and 10, but instead of Sonic applying their high standards to Roxio apps, they shoved MyDVD into EZCD Creator Suite and tied it to VideoWave, leaving the quality control in the hands of Roxio - making it pretty much useless.
Some of this has to do with my machine being made from scratch and my habit of replacing boards and drives often. But Nero and Ulead have no problems on my machine, so...
Last night I finally removed the last traces of Roxio from my PC.
