Chrome issues

I've been using Google Chrome for a couple of weeks now and it really is a nice looking piece of work. Kind of a joy to use.. It has a lot really nice stuff. But, I'm beginning to wonder whether it's not some kind of info gathering spy ware.

I'm on XP Media Center SP2. I hope I'm not being a bit cynical here but I'm beginning to wonder if Chrome has got a lot of stuff going on in the background. I see the modem going when I'm not doing anything. Could be update checks and the like. I've got quite a few anti scum-ware progs active. So who's to really say.

The download was rather big, I thought. Close to 10m. It seemed bigger that Firefox (ver 2 - under 6M) and Opera (ver 9.21 - under 5M) And - have they ever gone to lengths to hide it on my computer. I check the path for the .exe and I have yet to be able to get my machine to show the files and sub-folders for the Chrome program. I would like to check the size of things and the activity where ever possible. So I would appreciate suggestions here.

The path for the .exe is - "C:\Documents and Settings\Owner.YOUR-DC98270493\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" And do you think I can get my machine to show this folder and subdirectories and files. Not yet. Yes, I have the hidden files switched on in the folder options and, I could have missed something.

I wonder how other people are doing with this Browser. My view at this point is that it is nice looking, does a few neat things but it is not as good as Opera or Firefox, and in terms of security, it may even be worse than IE.