DAEMON Tools

As a long-time user of Daemon Tools, I was terribly surprised to find the developers have loaded their recent installations with malware and partnered with known Malware distributors such as "mountspace" (Malwarebytes considers them to be a malicious website, as well) in order to bring the end user bloatware of the Conduit variety, such as Opencandy and Sweetpacks.

Daemon Tools is dead. Stay far away if you know what is good for your computer and your sanity.

This was good until it added spyware and adware to it's install.

A while ago, Daemon Tools was the no-brainer choice for Disc emulation, tools like alcohol 120 were too bulky and useless against the ease of use of DT. But DT business model shifted, into a paid wall with ads for free users, and so alternatives grew stronger and better than this now old, full of bloatware software.

[Edited by frenchiveruti, February 07]
I would recommend, as I forgot to mention it, WinCDEmu, Open Source, fast, small, and easy to use.

Problems:

• Latest Windows 8 OS update with the latest Daemon Tools Lite breaks Windows Media Player. Loading an audio ISO file no longer notifies Windows Media Player that a new CD has been loaded. You must exit Windows Media Player and restart it for it to detect the newly loaded CD. This is unacceptable if you use Daemon Tools to play your audio CD ISO files.

• The new Quick Mount feature is a severe downgrade. Previously you could selectively eject and load a virtual CD image on individual drives without recreating the drive. You can no longer do this, because mounting and unmounting are creating and removing the drives on the fly, which plays havoc on apps that depend on CD loading and ejecting notification. Additionally, Quick Mount selects the next available drive for you and removes it when you unmount, so you lose control. This severely hampers your ability to decide which drive gets loaded with which CD image file.

• Virtual drives no longer persist through a reboot. Any mounted image gets ejected and the drive is removed. You have to set everything up all over again after a reboot.

• The WORST PROBLEM OF ALL is the installer is absolutely loaded with undesirable adware. It's difficult for even an expert user to avoid installing these unwanted and potentially dangerous programs. This is unacceptable.

I'm a long time Daemon Tools user but not anymore. I am currently evaluating alternative programs. I will also be converting over 1 TB in data files to move away from the MDX file format because it is a Daemon Tools format. I highly recommend you avoid this program at all costs.

Horrible, simply horrible.
I've wasted a few hours of my life while getting rid of all those pesky malwares that Daemon Tools light comes with.