Hi, I'm looking for someone to advise me on a program called Nielsen Netratings (or Netmeter). What is this program? Is it malicious? Undesirable? Safe? I've searched the web and found nothing more detailed than various reports of "this is a suspicious process" or "this is a safe process". Can you tell me any more about what this program does?

Here's my situation: a family member installed this program (or tried to) earlier today. She allowed the addition of a global startup entry. Later, I logged on and the program tried to add two more startup entries, which I blocked with Spybot. Despite this, the program already had three processes running as seen in the task manager. I killed the processes and removed the original startup entry.

Anyway, my question is... where should I go from here? Should I allow the program to run? I was going to uninstall it, but the program is conspicuously absent from the add/remove programs list...

Has any damage been done by this program being allowed to run previously? Am I just being overly paranoid? Please let me know if you need more information or an HJT log. My HJT results look OK to me, (no change compared to results before installation) but I'm no expert.

Here are the entries in my Spybot S&D log file:

3/4/2009 9:40:03 AM Allowed (based on user decision) value "NielsenOnline" (new data: "C:\Program Files\NetRatingsNetSight\NetSight\NielsenOnline.exe") added in System Startup global entry!
3/4/2009 4:54:41 PM Denied (based on user decision) value "NetMeter" (new data: "C:\Program Files\NetRatingsNetmeter\NetMeter\NielsenOnline.exe") added in System Startup global entry!
3/4/2009 4:54:43 PM Denied (based on user decision) value "NetMeterInstall" (new data: "rundll32.exe "C:\Program Files\NetRatingsNetmeter\NetMeter\nmobsvr.dll",InstallComponent") added in System Startup global entry!
3/4/2009 4:56:19 PM Allowed (based on user decision) value "NielsenOnline" (new data: "") deleted in System Startup global entry!