I think eHow managed to build up a certain reservoir of whatever the opposite of brand loyalty is among techies, so there's some lingering effect. These days I personally don't think eHow is uniquely bad. I don't think it on average has particularly great content (there are a handful of very good entries, but they're unusual), but it's not spam, or at least not more spammy than seems to be the norm in large-scale commercial media properties. A lot of it is just run-of-the-mill mediocre content on popular keywords, vaguely like About.com or the array of recipe sites, or (with some tilt towards current events) the kind of stuff published by Gawker, HuffPo, Cracked, etc.
On the plus side, I think they're going to use my team's Hackathon project on eHow to replace all the irrelevant remnant ads with relevant, related ones, and clean it up a bit.
I've found that for utterly and moronically basic stuff that I've forgotten about, eHow does an okay job. Of course, I can't speak for anything remotely complicated.
