So, you get a copy of Windows Live OneCare up and running, and it adds you to the "OneCare Circle" because your license is managed that way, right? Yeah, all that's fine, but then Microsoft had the brilliant idea to invite you to make one of your pc's a hub PC. A hub PC is basically a computer in your license circle that manages all of the pc's in that circle, and shows alerts when it *thinks* OneCare has managed to disabled something that is crucial to the security of that pc.
OneCare circles are pointless. The reason? Well, for one thing, I can't think of a reason to have the anti virus protection on another computer turned off, especially if you're not physically at that computer, and haven't been for days. But, sure enough, when I made my PC the hub pc for our 3 Vista PC's, OneCare started making up all kinds of crazy crap about stuff being disabled on other PC's, but when you tried to enable it again, it apparantly wasn't able to fix the problems. Obviously the OneCare installation on the actual computer didn't report such problems; partly because they weren't actually there, and partly because OneCare enjoys making up stuff to piss you off. I even had a case that OneCare insisted that one of our pc's had the firewall disabled, when the truth of the matter was that PC was completely powered off and was not accessible by any means, but obviously OneCare has majik ways of doing so.
OneCare circles don't do anything whatsoever, so whatever you do, don't use them. At least when Microsoft do implement pointless things into their software, most of the time you are able to turn them off or bypass them - except OneCare's tendency to "fix" the printer queue. Yeah, it does that too, and it enables your page file when you disable it.
I don't hate OneCare; don't get me wrong, I haven't had a single Virus infection since I got it over a year ago, but that may be partly because I don't download crap anymore. (Well, except for downloading OneCare, that's quite virus-like isn't it?)
