How to remove "WD Unlocker"?

[jfarrell]

I bought a My Book Essentials for home use, and it always puts the WD Unlocker on my desktop. If I unmount it, it comes right back. I found a KB article that talks about removing it, but it didn’t work. After calling WD Tech Support and getting escalated to Tier II, I was told that I have the “Mini” Virtual CD, and there is no way to disable this. It will always be there as long as the drive is connected to my computer. During the calls to WD, they had me install the WD SmartWare, against a lot of protest, but it had an option to hide the Virtual CD temporary, but a reboot or remounting the drive caused the Unlocker to appear on my desktop again. Plus, now I had the WD SmartWare always running on my computer and even placed an icon on my task bar. I consider this worse, because now their software is always running on my computer and it’s stuff I’ll never used. I did uninstall the WD SmartWare, and I noticed now when I unmount the WD Unlocker VCD, it stays unmounted and doesn’t remount. It also changed the icon of my drive too. Since it changed the behavior after uninstalling, I am left wondering what it has left on my system and changed? The Tier II tech support did tell me some WD Products that didn’t have their SmartWare on them, but none of them came in the 3 TB size. I just hope that the software doesn’t amount to a root kit. I am very protective of what gets installed and changed on my laptop, which has left me very disappointed with Western Digital after this last purchase.