Cicero winframe

After installing Half- Life2 I get a box at shutdown that says-ending program cicero winframe. I have never seen this until Half- life2 was installed. I have searched my comp. in every way and even googled for a description without any luck. Is this part of Half-Life? Has anyone else have seen this? Thanks
Den

 

I have also noted this upon closing XP pro. on two recent occassions...I also listed a file in task manager under cicero UIwindframe. I was checking this because I noted that my hard drive was spinning constantly....and my performance was way down....I was suprised to note that when I went into task manager...the cpu commit charge on these two, dropped to zero while I was in task manager, as well as my spin on the hard drive....I never loaded Half-life....though these files appeared on my computer.....Is it possible that this is a new form of spy-ware, etc...that erases itself...I have no file under these names existing on my computer at this time !!! and my computer has not had this performance problem since then....

 

Here is what I found on the web about 'Winframe' (summarized):

Half-Life2 comes with an integrated game launcher/updater/authenticator (crapware if you ask me) called 'steem' which puts itself in the Windows 'startup', wtf was Valve thinking? Anyhow you could disable this, also you could still run the game without being connected to the Internet but it would have to be launched as the appropriate option on the Steem's HL2 launch menu selected so that it wouldn't have to authenticate the user/game with online servers.

My question to you would be, where from did you install the game? I doubt it was a legit retail CD...

 

I discovered that Cicero winframe is part of steam and doesn't seem to pose any sort of threat. By shutting down steam before shutting down the comp. it will not show up at shutdown. I simply removed steam from startup. The funny thing is that it no longer shows up regardless of whether steam is running upon shutdown or not. I can only guess that it is part of steams updating process which appears to be automatic.
Turcolo thank you for your interest in this post. But I take offense at your suggestion that my copy of Half Life was pirated. Why would anyone doubt that it is a legitimate copy just because they don't understand something about the software. I am sure someone will be able to figure out how to install steam from a pirated copy of this game eventually but I don't see how and I sure am not smart enough to do that. The game was purchased at a local Best Buy store and the box was sealed and also had a barcode and given to me for my birthday by my daughter. Pirating software is stealing. I do not steal.
Den

 

Take no offense Den, I was trying to make sure that it was not a funny copy. I personally could care less if you did or not but the errors and problems that occur from cracked games are too many to count and most of the time too hard to figure out so I wanted to make sure your situation was not one of those. Since I caught the changes right after the installation and corrected it, I did not experience the same thing so it might be the case for all installations.
Still the functionality/description of the winframe seemed quite odd to be directly related to a game and I wanted make sure it was not added later on by a cracker...
I didn't mean to accuse you and that is never my intention, sorry for the misunderstanding. I am glad you were able to correct the problem though.