Disable Nero Scout in Nero 7

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

The last version of the Nero CD/DVD burning suite, Nero 7, installs a media database component called Nero Scout. This also adds several entries to your Windows startup, including NmBgMonitor.exe and NMFirstStart.exe which can hog system resources. Nero Scout has also been reported to cause all sorts of problems in Windows and with Nero. In this article we'll tell you how to disable Nero Scout. If you have Nero 8, read this article instead.

It should be noted that NmBgMonitor.exe and NMFirstStart.exe are not spyware.

What does Nero Scout do?

Ahead Software, the makers of Nero, have a web page for Nero Scout which can be viewed here.

Basically, the program is a media indexer. It constantly runs in the background, looking for new media files, i.e. MP3s, videos, and photos. When it finds such a file, it adds it to its own internal database. The database is used by other Nero programs, such as Wave Editor, Burning ROM, and PhotoSnap. The only purpose for the database is to give you a more convenient way to access those media files, without having to navigate the folders on your hard drive.

Unless you are a hard-core user of all of Nero's programs, Nero Scout is a useless piece of software bloat.

You might also consider upgrading to the latest version of Nero, Nero 8 Ultra Edition, which makes it easier to disable Scout and other features.

How do I get rid of Nero Scout?

The first thing to do is to disable Nero Scout via its own interface. To do so, double-click on the My Computer icon. Right-click on the Nero Scout icon and choose Options. Then uncheck the option for Enable Nero Scout.

Reboot your PC and see if you are still experiencing problems. If you are, and you are running Nero 7, you can also perform the following actions:

Click on the Start button and choose Run. Type the following line exactly as it appears:

regsvr32 /u "%COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\Ahead\Lib\MediaLibraryNSE.dll"

Then click OK and reboot your PC.

We hope that future versions of Nero will make it easier to disable system resource hogs like this program. Otherwise, Ahead Software will start to see their loyal fan base disappear.

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