my howto: clean up the mess made by SmartSelect

[irun5k]

Moved from Installation and Configuration in Mac OS by Xenos

So I had a nice shiny Leopard install that I had carefully groomed.

And along came Parallels 3.0. I installed it and brought over 3 Win32 VM's I had made on Tiger with Parallels 2 and I also created a new Boot Camp VM.

The I realize this Evil smart select ran its course (apparently it is ON by default?). I had four different versions of all the crappy Win32 apps that have all been registered in OS X! So much for the sandbox. I can't express in words how strongly I feel that Smart Select is a Bad Thing. I'd rather it not be in the tool at all but it absolutely should be OFF by default with a warning message if you try and turn it on.

Anyway, back to my "how to":

Stop all the VM's and one by one, go to the "Shared Applications" settings for your VM and turn off every checkbox on the page.

Next, delete all the contents in each of your "Windows Application" directories inside your VM directories in OS X.

Next, boot up your VM's and make sure that no OS X applications are visible in the start menu. If you open Parallels Tools, you'll see that the checkbox for Smart Select is SELECTED and DISABLED (greyed out) with no explanation of why it is greyed out. This troubles me, why isn't this checkbox deselected?

Finally, chances are your Launch Database in OS X may be hosed. I rebuit mine by running
lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
at a terminal. Use the locate command to find lsregister so you can path to it.

I hope this helps someone. I have a bad feeling that I haven't reversed all the damage so if anyone else knows of stuff that may be buggered up, I'd like to hear it. Again, I feel very strongly that Smart Select damaged the integrity of my OS X installation and I'm sure it wasn't too smooth on my VM images either. What the Parallels team failed to realize is that most people don't even want to run XP or Vista- we're only doing it because we have to for the time being until IE goes away forever and Autocad comes out for OS X. The last thing we want is Windows puke all over our OS X install.

[brkirch]

Try following the instructions in this post (http://forums.parallels.com/showpost.php?p=90914&postcount=9) to clean up SmartSelect more completely.

[irun5k]

Wow, 17 steps... About running the registry cleaner- what exactly are we trying to clean up? I don't doubt that there has been damage inflicted upon the registry, I'd just be curious to know exactly what the damage is and what the reg cleaner is going to repair.

Also, I think my simple how-to should have cleaned everything up on the OS X side- did I miss something? Essentially, I got rid of all the application stubs and seemed to have prevented them from ever coming back, and I rebuilt the launch database and it looks normal now. The only thing I can think of is if a person had individual files that got set on a one-by-one basis to be opened with one of the stubs, this would have to be fixed somehow.

I'm admittedly pretty anal about maintaining a clean OS and I'm very aware of the fact that a system getting crapped on the way mine has can cause problems down the road. I'm halfway considering rebuilding my machine and VM's from scratch again and dumping parallels in favor of the "other" virtulization software which does apparently doesn't contain malicious features like SmartSelect.

What do you think I might have missed, going through my steps instead of yours? Maybe I can still clean it up by hand.

[brkirch]

Wow, 17 steps... About running the registry cleaner- what exactly are we trying to clean up? I don't doubt that there has been damage inflicted upon the registry, I'd just be curious to know exactly what the damage is and what the reg cleaner is going to repair.

The purpose of running the registry cleaner is just to remove any stray SmartSelect file associations on the Windows side, since you can share Mac applications to Windows.

Also, I think my simple how-to should have cleaned everything up on the OS X side- did I miss something? Essentially, I got rid of all the application stubs and seemed to have prevented them from ever coming back, and I rebuilt the launch database and it looks normal now. The only thing I can think of is if a person had individual files that got set on a one-by-one basis to be opened with one of the stubs, this would have to be fixed somehow.

You just missed the settings in shared web applications, those need to be set to default.

I'm admittedly pretty anal about maintaining a clean OS and I'm very aware of the fact that a system getting crapped on the way mine has can cause problems down the road. I'm halfway considering rebuilding my machine and VM's from scratch again and dumping parallels in favor of the "other" virtulization software which does apparently doesn't contain malicious features like SmartSelect.

Avoiding SmartSelect isn't too difficult, just keep shared applications turned off in any VMs you create (don't turn a new VM on until shared applications are turned off) and you should never have to deal with it. The full reset of file associations is more than sufficient to avoid future problems, so you shouldn't need to worry about it any further than that.

[irun5k]

Well, I took a look at my registry and it definitely still had all the now unused "open with" stuff.

So I gave RegSeeker a try.

It sure removed a lot of stuff- it wiped a lot of things seeming not related to SmartSelect. I think this is odd since this was literally a brand new Vista install, prior to any 3rd party software other than Parallels tools.

For one tiny example just to illustrate the point, it removed a ton of things under the VirtualStore area of the registry. I don't think things in this area are automatically junk- they are there for legacy application support. Well, I guess if I run into things that are broken I can always restore the keys.