If downloaded from the developer site and you are using these miners directly with flags you specify, then everything is fine. These miners themselves can be run without ever showing a window or taskbar icon meaning that someone can write a program in seconds that can run this on your computer without you ever knowing it (except when you check why your CPU/GPU are running slow or acting up). And since crypto-currency is actual money that could be made, those who have control of thousands of infected computers can run these miners to mine on those computers on their behalf. This is why these programs are flagged. Not because the programs themselves are illegitimate, but because they could be and likely have been used in illegitimate ways.

When I tried the installer for 12.8 for my 7790, it said there was no compatible hardware found but going through the device manager and pointing to the folder where the installer extracted, it installed successfully and has been running stable since. When I had the latest driver installed, I had about 275 mh/s for bitcoin and 33 kh/s for litecoin. After going to 12.8, I get 308 mh/s and 220 kh/s.

Did you look around for the version 12.8 drivers? Those seem to be the best to mine with. In any case, go to device manager, uninstall the driver, make sure when you click Uninstall, you check "Delete driver software for this device". Once uninstalled, try reinstalling (Preferably version 12.8 ).

Don't let it happen again! 

ouch... new difficulty 15605632 

Well, I'm brand new to Bitcoin but I figure, if I make the money back on my new video card in 3-4 months, I'll be tempted to buy another and double my hashing power and see how that plays out. If it doesn't work out though, I'll at least have a couple new video cards that I could put to good use. I was in the situation where my old GeForce 9600GT just wasn't cutting it anymore so I bought a Radeon 7790 for mining/gaming. I'm currently dedicating the Radeon to 24/7 mining on an older computer that I also use as an NAS and as long as I see at least some reasonable gains from mining, I'll keep it there.

Interesting idea but for the first one, what would stop people from programming bots to know the answers in advance? The second one would still require a lot of work with the sheer amount of posts and new registrations. The subject of spam and newbies is definitely a hard subject to solve. Maybe until we adopt something like biometric logins (could cut down on bots and duplicate accounts) in the mainstream but I'm sure someone will find a way around that too.

Just tried with a Motorola XPRT, looks great and works great 

Yes I agree a bit expensive. My Radeon 7790 goes at about 292 Mh/s and it only cost me $140 USD which at today's BTC prices is only slightly more than half the price of one of those. Your only gain with the USB is the lower power consumption which would still take a while to make up the difference.

Well one of the nice things about alt currencies currently is to use them as a fallback. Once the ASICs for Bitcoins start becoming more numerous, those of us using only GPUs can switch over to another currency that the ASICs aren't able to mine (and I emphasize currently since obviously any currency that's worth it will likely have ASICs at some point or another)