That's applying technology to a, fundamentally, people problem and it may not yield predictable results. Such solutions aren't going to appeal to the vast majority of non-tech savvy people (and hosted solutions are arbitrary at best, censorship-inclined at worst) therefore will not make a dent in the actual proliferation of "crapware".

In short, anything that requires more effort than is necessary to install crapware, will not see adoption rates higher than the crapware itself.

We need something else.

Maybe I was not clear (its pretty hard).

I think that there will be a home hub, a technology helper, supplemented from the cloud, but anchored to the family home network point, that is the natural place to deliver a wide variety of services, digital backup, net nanny, finacnes fridges etc.

Make something the gateway to the house and that something will be defended by house owners as much as the physical house itself - it becomes the virtual avatar for the house.

It will probably be called Jarvis.

Might I recommend one of these sub-100 things: http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax

They are amazing.

You'd pay a hell of a lot extra for such a router. It wouldn't be much help in finding out what happened though.

Such a thing would be much better implemented as a windows application firewall. It would be able to detect which app did it, which dll initiated it (so you can catch IE extensions in the act), and it would have a hard drive available for storing the results. This sort of tool does in fact exists as part of pretty much every antivirus product.

The problem is malware can subvert that application.

thank you - my point exactly.