Helpful software or malware?

One thing I often do when visiting relatives is fix their computers. They normally have various theories on what the problems are, but increasingly the issues are caused by "assistants" and "helpers" and "utilities" installed by hardware and software vendors on the systems of unsuspecting users.

A perfect example is TGCMD (tgshell.exe). This site has more details on this software: http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist_t.htm
including this amusing (though sad) comment:
"Absolutely nightmarish software which eats up CPU, drives the hard disk hard, causes boot-up Kernel32 errors, generates illegal operations, invalid page faults and much more."

I will add that it caused my in-laws' PC to hang with a "Cannot find tgshell.exe" error and take a very long time to start up.

Sorry, but this is not only spyware (as mentioned at the link above), but -- since it is launching a continual, insidious DoS on the host computer -- in my opinion it's good, old-fashioned malware.