RealOne Player, a product from RealNetworks, is the best solution to playing all RealMedia files that are available on the internet. Unfortunately, unless you dished out cash to purchase the "Plus" version, you and I are stuck with the Basic Player, as well as the liberty of spyware, ads, pop-ups and adware. This guide will inform you of optimising the "Real" experience.
1.) First of all, Gator advertising software is included with RealOne and is added at installation, use Ad-aware or SpybotSD to rid of this threat. Also have a check for Gator-related material here. Other annoyances include the helper application which can be deleted in this directory; delete realsched.exe, rnathchk.exe and realevent.exe.
2.) To stop part of the problem with RealOne starting-up with Windows, click the Start menu, select "Run" and type in "msconfig". De-select "realsched".
3.) Enter "Preferences" from the "Options" menu in RealOne, and in the General menu, choose anything besides "Web" in "RealOne Player Options".
4.) Under Internet Settings which can be found by "Connection", uncheck everything besides "Enable HTML Clip Info.".
5.) Disable RealOne for checking for file-type associations whilst it is NOT running under Media Types.
6.) Go to Automatic Services and un-check all.
Optional: Disable "Automatic Updates" if you wish RealOne not to automatically download and install updates.
6.) RealOne constantly creates a folder called "My Music" in the root of the HDD, to disable this varies from OS to OS so do a registry search (Start -> Run -> Regedit) for DownloadDir or C:\My Music\ and change the value to a directory of your choice.
And one final note, if you wish to completely deny access to RealOne, create a new entry in the HOSTS file with: 127.0.0.1 www.real.com.
Hopefully this will lead you to a more pleasant experience involving RealOne.
Enjoy!
