DENVER -- The makers of Turbo Tax caused a major scandal last year when they slipped a hidden piece of computer programming into the software. The company said nothing, but customers were outraged.

"I've used Turbo Tax for years and I've always liked it," said Rich Owens, a longtime Turbo Tax user.

Owens is one of the millions of buyers who've made Turbo Tax a best seller every year.

But last year, a program hidden inside Turbo Tax kept feeding user information back to the software company even after Turbo Tax was removed. 7NEWS asked computer technicians at the Micro Center computer store to see if the hidden program was back for 2003 returns.

"We ran a few installs, both clean installs ands regular machines to see if the adware or the spyware was actually detectable and there was none whatsoever," said Skip Dwyer, the Micro Center's store manager.

Computer technician Michael Lom scanned both Turbo Tax and the computer hard drive with a program called "Ad Aware."

"If there's any sort of data mining cookies that watch what you're doing, essentially, those get cleaned out," said Lom.

Micro Center's Skip Dwyer said you're more likely to encounter hidden programs when you're surfing the Internet.

"Is it common on purchased software? No. They haven't gone to that point and I think last year's test with Intuit probably gave them a good idea of how people felt," said Dwyer.

When was the last time you took a long, hard look to see what's hiding on your computer hard drive?

Free programs such as Ad Aware can find and delete spyware. You might also want to try Spy Bot.