When even Linus Torvalds is heaping sardonic praise on Windows 7, you know Microsoft must be doing something right. But the gloss was definitely starting to come off for my colleague Stuart Turton and I over the past week or so.

For some unfathomable reason, Word 2007 was really starting to struggle – letters would appear on screen an annoying second or so after you typed them, and scrolling through long documents produced more jerks than an X-Factor audition. Not an ideal scenario for harassed journalists on press week.

Word’s not usually the first application to exhibit performance problems. If your processor or memory are being pushed to breaking point, you’d normally expect 3D games or DVD playback to be suffering from the heebie-jeebies first – but both those applications were fine on our systems. A performance widget on my desktop also confirmed that the processor and 3GB of memory in my laptop weren’t being unduly burdened by Word, either.

 A quick straw poll of the office revealed that only Stu and I were suffering from Word Arthritis – with the rest of the team quietly assuming there was actually nothing wrong with our PCs and that it was just the news team having a deadline-induced meltdown.

After ruling out everything from Aero Glass to graphics drivers it finally dawned upon us – we were the only two running the Windows 7 trial version of Kaspersky Anti-Virus. A quick uninstall later, and Word was back to its normal responsive self on both our systems. What’s more the odd juddering Aero Glass animation and occasional problem with saving files to our office network appears to have disappeared, too.

We’re not going to be too hard on Kaspersky: this is a free prototype security suite running on a beta operating system. Bugs are to be expected. And unlike AVG, at least Kaspersky hasn’t got the brass neck to charge for protection of a beta OS.

But although we probably shouldn’t say it, we’re rather enjoying the liberation of being free from the constant nagging and annoying slowdown of our Russian minder. Can we live without security software on the office network? Probably only until our IT manager notices. 

It’s not that I think automatic updates are necessarily a bad idea.* But why bug me about it now? I can only surmise that Microsoft really hates the fact that I’ve chosen to manage my own computer; so they’ve decided to tack a nuisance requester onto an unrelated process in the hope of nagging me into quiescence.

This sort of opportunistic piggybacking used to be the preserve of spyware. But, sad to say, these days I’m increasingly finding unrelated crap bundled into otherwise legitimate packages.

Generally, of course, it’s software or services that are being pushed, rather than paternalistic management policies. Take AVG Antivirus, for example – on installation it asks to change your default search provider to Yahoo!, as if that’s any of its business. The latest WinZip tries to install a trial of Uniblue RegistryBooster 2. And, if I’m not mistaken, don’t recent Firefox packages try to get you to install the Google Toolbar? Admittedly that is at least browser-related, but it’s still disappointing to see such flagrant shilling from a package which started out as the epitome of simple, stripped-down functionality.

Perhaps the most offensive culprit is Apple. Companies that bundle third-party software with free or shareware packages can at least argue that it brings in commission to offset the costs of development and distribution. But, as you probably saw in the news back in March, Apple has been using iTunes as a Trojan horse to push the ugly, redundant Safari for Windows onto users’ PCs. That’s no sponsorship deal – it’s a straightforward Microsoftesque power grab.

All right, it could be worse. For now, all of these unwanted collateral installations are optional. Keep your eyes open and you can untick the boxes, keep automatic updates turned off and lead a relatively happy and productive life.

But as bundling becomes an increasingly accepted fact of life, there’s nothing standing between popular packages and the old spyware trick of requiring you to install some unrelated third-party program in order to get the application you want. They could even check for its presence at runtime, to stop you simply clearing out the crap after installation. If things come to that, the best case scenario is a huge increase in clutter on your hard disk; the worst is resource conflicts and security holes caused by programs you didn’t ever even want to install.

If that’s where we’re heading, count me out. From now on, I’m not going to let any installer install anything that isn’t a bona fide program component. Even if the bundled application is something I want, I will download it separately, rather than legitimising the idea of bundling. And if there’s no way to get what I want in a standalone package, I will, so far as is practically feasible, do without.

I realise that this individual decision probably won’t make much difference in the grand scheme of things. Indeed, if everybody did the same, it’d squeeze developers who currently provide us with some great software for free. But while Microsoft clearly has trouble with the principle of “my computer, my decision”, I think it’s an important one, and I shall cling to it even if it means – deep breath – paying for software.