Windows 7: Badware - VIA HD Audio Deck

Hi there
This piece of software isn't malware or a virus but a really irritating part of the VIA HD audio software
- a little popup message always starts in the system tray when you boot your system from HD Via messaging centre.

That's why I think "Badware" is a more appropriate name for it.

The actual mixer itself is fine screenshot enc, but is there any way to get rid of the start popup from the messaging centre. (I think Real Player also used to do something like that as well).

I don't really want to remove the entire application as the mixer is good.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi jimbo,

What does the popup say? Have you checked the startup options?

Hi there
just a little tiny box which says Hdeck Message
Welcome -- and then disappears.

program is Hdeck.exe - pefectly legit program - just has that annoying message - only lasts for a second or so.

If you run it from the menu you get the little message as well -- I've disabled it from the startup.

Cheers
jimbo

First off, this was a great annoyance for me aswell. I am used to the Realtek mixer, which they have had the good manor of putting a checkbox option "Display icon in system tray" on. I was disappointed when I realized that VIA has no similar option in their mixer applet.

Of course, I found a descent work-around in pulling the good ol' msconfig.exe and thus disable hdeck.exe from even launching during Windows boot-up. However, it felt kinda messy. Not that I use the VIA mixer, cus it's really just calling the same strings as sndvol32.exe anyways so, I find the whole mixer applet superfluous in all. But still, blocking the initial launch of hdeck.exe felt bad, like I was overriding something vital.

However, tonight, I finally found the real solution. It appears that VIA has thought of the user's possible unwillingness of using the HD Deck. However, they've hidden the feature real well. Now check this out.

Start / Run:
%PROGRAMFILES%\VIA\VIAudioi\HDADeck\HDeck.ini

That's the key. Now these are the two values I've found of great interest.

Initial_and_Exit=0
Show_Tray_Icon=1

Default values are as present above. In my case, I changed Initial_and_Exit to 1. Now, during Windows boot-up, it calls hdeck.exe, but it sort of just flashes by memory, to be initialized followed by an instant termination, sort of. This process is 100% invisible. It all happens in the far background, so no annoyance.

For those who for some reason still wants hdeck.exe to be a present background process running on your system, but without the system tray icon, I suppose Show_Tray_Icon=0 would be the correct approach.

Anyways, just thought I'd share this.
Hope it'll be of any help for someone.

Definitely something not right with this software/driver. I use a lifecam 5000 for Skype and it's integrated microphone kept on failing - the only way to resolve it was to plug it into another USB port, once a port had been used it wouldn't work again so i couldn't plug it back into a previously used one. Once all the ports (8 of them) had been used I had to reinstall the lifecam software and drivers. (This did not put me in a celebratory mood.)
Then during Skype calls the audio of the person I'd called would reverb or echo making the call impossible to listen to. Switching USB ports would fix it. Then the reverb started happening to all system sounds.
Going into VIA HD Deck and selecting independent headphones would sometimes fix it, sometimes not.

Solution for me was Add Remove Programs. Find the VIA install (wasn't actually called audio deck, can't recall it's name), and uninstalled it.
Everything works correctly now, using the normal Microsoft audio controller.

I call these "ill behaving" programs that do what they want and add crap that you don't want and either can't get rid of or have a hard time disabling. Unfortunately you need the audio drivers but on other software such as RealPlayer I just dumped the program.