When connecting, it takes forever. Naturally, it is abhorrent to most non-retards to do something else, especially since most users will have more than one task cooking. But when the "black window" opens, it steals focus and pops to the foregound. And again, for the password prompt. Since using pcAnywhere exposes you to a mess of typing in passwords all over, naturally it always manages to interrupt you in the middle of another one. With no way to see exactly where in the middle. And if that's a password on the remote end of another connection, backspacing over it and starting over may take another 10 minutes. Applications shouldn't ever steal focus, if it has to do anything throw a goddamned beep to inform me, but I'm doing something more important you worthless piece of shit.

And the circumstances under which it can disconnect are nothing short of baffling. The TCP protocol itself allows for retransmission, and yet a single mouseclick on a buggy connection can kill it dead in a split second. Not long enough to time out, it's like it's choking on the flood of bandwidth that is a single XY:34,175-left-mouse-button signal or something. What is that, an entire staggering 3 bytes plus minor overhead?

Oh, and worst of all. The goddamn capslock key is ALWAYS toggled on at the other end. And it respects this. The only workaround is to toggle yours on, which causes problems as soon as you switch to another session. If it just absolutely has to honor this, or use raw keyboard scancodes (WTF?), why can they not have an easily accessible option to remotely toggle the other end off? Have the usability experts at Symantec never -once- stumbled upon this annoyance?

The absolute lack of image/background caching is so obvious that it's beyond pathetic. Why bother sending me the same window I had uncovered 10 seconds ago, when simple logic could detect that it hadnt changed, and not force you to waste the bandwidth that it plainly can't manage? Why, when it disconnects suddenly, does it assume that I'm finished with the site, and close the window (and clearing what part of the desktop image I do have) ? Keep that window open, give me an msgbox() or whatever it is in win32, and allow me to reconnect! And on reconnect, have the remote end check to see if I need to repaint the entire screen! Christ... nothing is worse than getting only the first top inch of the screen, losing it, and starting over.

I'll not even bother with whining about image compression. Maybe the 1 cent per unit royalties on all the common algorithms would bankrupt them. Or maybe they've never even heard of RLE.

But most of all, if any Symantec people somehow discover this and read it: If you're too fucking stupid to write code that can check if the screen needs repainted, put a goddamn button on it, so I can force it to do so. Between 15 minutes to reconnect and force it that way, and blindly clicking hoping I can guess the location of an "ok" button that I cannot see, I am so sorely tempted to choose a third... committing suicide.

I could go on, but somewhere around 3 paragraphs it started sounding pathologically slanted. Those of you that have used this piece of garbage (used? suffered?) know I'm not lying.