Tell me about it. I just got a comcast connection a couple of weeks ago and comcast has been, seemingly at random, kicking me into a captive portal that tries to scare you into installing their software.

The worst part is that it only keeps me in the captive portal just short enough that I haven't been compelled to figure out how to make dd-wrt stop it yet. I'll be sitting there putzing around on the Internet, try to google something and hit their portal. A few refreshes later and I'll be back in business.

Maybe it's because I'm always setting up with a home router, but I haven't had to install anything for my last three internet setups. I wasn't even asked to for this last one I believe. The tech just made sure the modem was working properly and he could get a solid connection from it, and then I plugged in my router and was good to go.

I recently upgraded my Fios connection and when the tech replaced my router he asked to install some software. I was currently booted into my Linux partition at the time, so he basically said "oh, well" and everything worked fine out of the box. It's likely bloatware.

Comcast installs a piece of software that drops shortcuts to comcast.net and stuff on your desktop. It also installs whatever antivirus thing they have a contract with. McAfee?

However, they only have Windows and Mac versions of the stuff.

They tried installing that stuff on my computer when I joined too. A simple, nope, not installing any software I haven't actively tried to acquire sufficed.

That or I could just have logged into my freebsd router off the serial port and said have at it, good luck, but that would be mean to the tech.