Encompass Monitor (Score 3, Interesting)

Sorry if this has been covered already in an earlier post - I didn't attempt to read all 949 postings listed as of this moment.

I bought a Dell a few years ago and, after installing a desktop firewall, discovered that it comes installed with a program called "Encompass Monitor" (encmon.exe). Encmon was attempting to call out something on the order of 20 times per minute, and I blocked the program. A friend advised me that this program is well-known Dell spyware and I should uninstall it. It is not hard to uninstall. You just locate the program on the Control Panel/Add Remove programs and remove it.

Behold - a week or two after I removed Encompass Monitor, I began seeing daily probes INCOMING in the desktop firewall logs from various DSL-identified addresses associated with Dell Computer, Inc. So, the people in Texas who were receiving the log files from this spyware suddenly realized their baby was not phoning home any more and began sending probe packets to my machine to find out why. I am really not sure what Dell was tracking, but I suspect it may have been my web-surfing habits, in an attempt to do data mining for sales to other companies who could target my "interests." If anyone has any better intelligence on what data is sent to Dell by Encmon.exe, I'd appreciate a reply, just out of curiosity.