When I was still in college and trying to do assignments and use all sorts of graphics programs to get things done and onto flash-drives: The SecuROM that snuck onto my system with one of the Sims titles made my life a misery. It killed Nero, which I was using to burn presentations to DVD for uni applications. It then clogged up one of my CD drives, and finally it froze a flash disk (its only function now is as a paperweight... and not a good one at that) with the only copy of my final presentation for Art History.

That was when I made this PC my gaming PC. Since I've stopped trying to use this for what it was meant to be used for and started using it as a console, I haven't noticed SecuROM at all. Occasionally it tries to disable my firewall but fortunately my computer tells it where to go, which will sometimes result in a crash.

So yeah. In my experience: SecuROM doesn't do anything to your computer, so long as you don't try to do anything WITH your computer. If your machine is just for gaming, then you won't have any problems at all, but if you need to use your computer for work/college/uni: do NOT put SecuROM or any product infested with it anywhere NEAR your DVD/CD/Whatever-drive.

I'm still one of those people who likes to hold a game in their hands and say "yeah I own this". Even if companies started just doing digital downloads and stopped selling games in stores, I'd start installing games onto portable memory devices. I still want to be able to play things when my computer dies a horrible flaming death.

That said, it totally wouldn't put me off PC games; I'd just go about how I stored those games differently.