Technology Notebook

RealPlayer, RealOne, ...

I'm starting to despise all the "Real_____whatever____" products. They are so huge and have built in web browser with it's own security bugs/etc. I just want the little realplayer we used to have (maybe ver 4) that downloaded on even a slow dialup connection within a reasonable time and installed in a snap.
Besides RealAudio uses kind of ugly network communications. Too many ports and options. Firewall is almost a guarantee that somebody's real___ server somewhere won't work for us.
Using MS ISA (another over featured bloated mess) just for "caching" (MS-PROXY 2.0 was a perfected product, so they just had to trash it all and write a huge, messy, buggy thing.)
Anyway, using ISA for caching only and turning on the requirement that only authenticated users can get out to the web I am having problems with RealPlayer 8-9, RealOne 1-2. It doesn't behave nicely when it comes to authenticating the user.
I can't decide if RealNetworks is too lame and/or lazy to fix their stuff or if Microsoft is just being a pain to try to push RealNet out.
An "almost hit" on my issue is at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];288734
Sometimes (and some users) get a logon prompt and it will work if the user logs in (but it's still a pain and people are whining.) But other times it just returns "access denied" without presenting any logon prompt.