Microsoft's .NET 3.5 Framework is a mostly useful thing. A lot of software needs .NET now to run properly. So I generally install this on all my systems. Microsoft pushes it big time as well, and includes it as a critical update in Windows Update.
But it also adds an unneeded and unnecessary addon to Firefox when installing as well. Without telling you. Without working through the standard methods (e.g. Mozilla's addon site at https://addons.mozilla.org). The .NET assistant extension adds .Net click-once support to Firefox. Why would you want that? It's a giant security hole. Keeping away from these close browser-OS tie-ins is normally the big reason to use Firefox over Internet Explorer.
So Microsoft made a really bad decision here. If people want this, they should add it on separately, and not just have it secretly installed for them.
The removal system as published by Microsoft for this is convoluted and very manual. I wanted a way to push this out to multiple systems quickly and easily. So I I figured out how to do this all via batch and added it to my home network login script (and to a couple clients' network login scripts.)
Here's a link to my batch code:
http://members.dslextreme.com/users/mattb47/blog/remove-firefox-dot-net-extension.bat
More info on this whole issue/problem here:
http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-to-rid-yourself-of-microsofts.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963707
http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/02/27/uninstalling-the-clickonce-support-for-firefox.aspx
I hope this is useful to others...
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