I bought one of those nice WD Passports, but they apparently come with annoying "smartware" that I can't remove (doesn't show up in explorer) and that tries to install on my PC every time I hook it up. Anyone have something very useful to say on the subject of the smartware, or know of a way to have my computer ignore requests for installation? It's automatically set to autorun when installed, and I'm trying to keep my processes as clutter-free as possible.

Connect drive. Open My Computer. Right click the drive. Format in NTFS.

negro's solution will not help you at all.

The SmartWare image is stored on the hard drive itself. The passport enclosure has a flash chip that has the drive's firmware on it. The firmware is configured to seek to a certain position on the HD where the SmartWare software is stored and activate it like a CD image. The firmware controls the encryption and password protection services of the drive. The SmartWare takes up about 700mb on the drive itself, and the firmware is designed so that you cannot write or see that area of the HD.

You can take the HD out of the enclosure and it will (should) act just like a regular hard drive - you can format the entire thing and remove the SmartWare software. However when you put the drive back into the enclosure, the firmware will still prevent you from accessing those 700mb, and will attempt to mount the CD image that used to be there. Because this is all part of the firmware, all you can do is replace the firmware with new firmware. As of a month ago when I investigated this, there was no 3rd party firmware available to do this.

The best you can do is download a firmware update from the WD site that lets you disable the SmartWare, however you will still not be able to access the ~700mb that is being shadowed by the firmware, it just won't mount itself as a CD Rom drive. If you want to get the SmartWare back in the future (???) you can apparently use the same tool to re-flash/re-enable it, but of course I've never tried this myself.

The best WD drives to get are Elements drives, because they do not come with SmartWare. There is a table on the WD site showing which drives have what.

See also: http://www.staredit.net/230663/

I tried updating it and couldn't find the disabling part - what about making Windows 7 ignore requests by "WD Smartware", is that possible?

If it's trying to install something, a UAC prompt should pop up. There might be a way to tell Windows to never trust WD (or the listed publisher), but I don't know. The less elegant way is to just hit no. You did leave UAC enabled, right? You should have. Go turn it on.

If you don't disable it properly, every time you plug it into someone elses computer, you'll have the annoying thing pop up again.

Just fix it properly and then you don't have any problems. There are step-by-step instructions on their website (or if not, their forums) on how to do it. It really is as simple as selecting "disable smartware" on a dialog and clicking ok.