Yikes! This is SCARY stuff. Kenny, my GUESS would be that these files are actually part of Mac OS X itself. A way to find out would be to see whether they exist on a recent-ish Mac OS X system that has never had a external Western Digital drive installed. I'm thinking they might needed to have the drive work as a drive. Since the WD drive has both FireWire (IEEE 1394) and USB interfaces, I guess one could try just deleting, say, the USB files and seeing whether the drive now works only with FireWire, but--well, personally I am not touching ANYTHING in THAT directory.
Here's where I'm at. I deleted
com.WesternDigital.WDSmartWareD.plist
com.wdc.WDDMservice.plist
from LaunchDaemons; I deleted the entire WD Smartware directory from Application Support; and I deleted WD Smartware.App itself.
When I restart, there is no SmartWare icon in the menu. There is one process running whose name begins with wd, "wdhelper". Notice that "wd" are lowercase. I don't think this is a Western Digital, I think it might be something to do with WirelessDiagnosticsSupport.framework.
The WD drive seems to work and DiskUtility finds nothing wrong with it.
I am, however, dreading the update. You may be sure I will physically disconnect all external drives before updating. The scary/ironic part is that the WD drive is the one with the partition on which I keep a bootable backup copy of the OS, i.e. it's the one that's supposed to be there to boot from if an update goes wrong.
What I'm really worried about is that I've deleted SmartWare a few times and it always comes back. I have the feeling that perhaps there's some way-too-clever stuff on the WD drive itself that executes when the drive mounts and reinstalls Smartware or something of the sort.
No, I still haven't contacted WD. I just have no faith that they would know what to do after the first thing they told me to do didn't work, and, yes, at this point I'm in an awful never-never land where my attempts at manual deletion mean that at this point you might not even expect the uninstaller to work.
Moral: The next time I buy an external drive, the first thing I will do is reformat it to remove any and all "value-added" software. My WD drive has this stupid LCD window that's supposed to show how full it is, and like an idiot didn't wipe SmartWare because I wanted the window to work.
