I've "micro-managed" mine since 2005 and haven't got tired of it. I'd imagine it depends on how often you update or change things on your system. If I was running an AV, it would be a lot more hassle, just from the update process. My system doesn't change often so there isn't much maintenance involved. SSM and Kerio remain silent during normal usage. Trying to maintain a reasonable level of privacy and dealing with the increasingly intrusive tracking methods is becoming a pain. IMO, maintaining the integrity of your system is easy in comparison. Defeating the tracking methods often breaks things on the website. On my own PC, I can reduce the filtering when Proxomitron breaks a site. The problem is the PC used by everyone else. I gave up on using Proxomitron on it. Every time I looked at that PC, Proxomitron was in bypass mode. doing nothing. I'd showed them how to bypass its filtering when it was necessary to make a site work, and they chose to leave it that way. For me, a big pain is finding a way to defeat a substantial amount of the tracking and blocking the more annoying ads on a PC with casual users. Options that allow them to disable the filtering/protection have been ineffective as they won't turn them back on. The FlashBlock extension helps some. Eraser regularly wipes the cache and the locations used by flash to store records. Beyond that, I'm low on ideas that work for a typical users PC. The one idea I'm considering is to make a snapshot of the entire system, then let them use it for a week. After that, make another snapshot, compare them. Take note of all the files/folders that changed and compare that to the browser history. Then I could set Eraser to wipe those on regular intervals or attempt to make the locations read-only and prevent the writing of usage tracks.
