Until this story hits mainstream, there's no hope of that happening. Even if it does hit mainstream, you need a bunch of talking heads that are able to explain to luddites what the implications are.

One can hope it destroys the brand for power-users. It's been a while since I've been using windows, but in the past I've trusted download.com when I needed some piece of freeware. I'll be more careful now.

What about all the the open source projects hosted there? A quick search shows that they offer VLC and Firefox - are they clean?

The guy in the Nmap mailing list says

    I've just discovered that C|Net's Download.Com site has started
    wrapping their Nmap downloads (as well as other free software
    like VLC)

It has in my mind. I feel sorry for all the users who would still trust them.

I feel sorry for anyone who's ever had to use download.com.