This is the patch we were speaking about. It has many problems:
a) It does more than they claim. They do write something, but the puprpose is misleading.
b) It removes the cloack in an unsafe manner which in some legitimate situations will cause crashes - this is due to basic lack of knowledge about how drivers should be handled, by the company who produced this software that Sony BMG use.
c) One will use it only if one can track the source of the problems to Sony BMG, and it is likely that there will be such. Because of the tricks that they used it is not easy to track the source of the code to Sony, and it even demands some non-trivial knowledge to know that its even there. Software that meddles with the core of the operating system, and is not coordinated with Microsoft, is likely not to be compatible with future changes, and there is no reliable update mechanism to fix such problems. It is not an application, that at most will crash. It may take the whole OS with it.
Such a reliable system cannot always exist (because one may install the software on a computer which is not connected to the Internet).
d) One that follows the instruction that Russinovich's followed in Sony BMG's site, will be instructed to send e-mail, while agreeing to receive promotional content from Sony and other third party, just in order to get the patch.
e) and the main problem with this patch is that it comes from a company which has already shown a lack of integrity - so it doesn't really matters what is the purpose of the patch and how much is this purpose legitimate. I can no longer trust anything that comes from Sony BMG, and don't want to have any code that comes from them.
They offer no way to uninstall all of their code (and if they were, then I still need that someone like Russinovich will check that it is indeed what it claims to be).