Byter and Myself spent most of the other Day Saturday(11/23)trying to get rid of a file which attached itself to Gins mail. It came about as the result of downloading Hotbar (from Hotbar.com) She deleted all the files except this Monkey animation.and more than that. it has slowed the Processor speed to a crawl (she's running XP!) This program acts like a trojan VIRUS!!
They hid the "Proper" Full Uninstall file deep down in the "small print" section
I risked breaking my computer by A) downloading this uninstall file ,then B)clicked on the download link which started loading the program onto my computer without any prompting (No Zip file,no folder with No ".exe" Readme/FAQs or Uninstall files) , then up pops the Registration form and already there were "New" buttons appearing like mad all over my Internet Explorer page like the plague without me doing anything so I went offline located the "Uninstall" file I downloaded earlier clicked on it (drew a deep breath...) and it was deleted except for 1 entry in the Registry and an empty file In Program files and there were lots of undeletable (but unrunnable) name tags in the Registry (Need a Washer program to get rid of them) so in the few minute it was in my system it went just about everywhere in the registry.Other Spyware doesn't take over that much And I have both Gozilla and Gator on my computer they have about 6? entries in the Registry altogether!!
I found this feedback review for Hotbar see what other people had to say about it
ZDNet Downloads - User opinions for Hotbar 4.0 here.
80% hated it the remainder were dubious about it

[This message was edited by bedstor on 11-24-02 at 05:12 PM.]

Thanks very much, bedstor, for issuing that warning. It was very good of you to help Gin like that. I have no idea what Hotbar is so I don't think there's much chance of me getting it, but I'll avoid it you can be sure.

Catty

Langa.com has a good article about "Scumware" that is really just a legal virus. Legal, because it tricks you into agreeing with an End User License Agreement (EULA).

Read the details here:

2) "Greeting" Card EULA Abusers

I'm glad I didn't delete that Uninstall file
Yesterday I visited a MP3 music download site (one of the betterknown sites) and it downloaded again without warning!!
And all I was doing was moving my mouse pointer over an advertising banner (Not advertising Hotbar)
So the Hotbar curse strikes again! (and removed again )

I'm sorry, bedstor.



What have I gotten you into?

Today I "exorcised" the last of the links from my registry (The Hotbar "nametag" links) that even a registry cleaner couldn't shift (it's a good easy to work program) http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/regcleaner.shtml
Only 540 bytes file size!
The reason it refused was that "Hotbar" was on the "protected files" list
Anyway deleting the entries has had no effect on any programs(I backed up the registry before I started just in case it backfired )
FYI:The reg.Files that can go are labelled:"IHbElementFocus" (4 of them (I think?)
or run a search for "Focus" finds 1 other reg. entry besides,but it is a critical file (Caution ! )

[This message was edited by bedstor on 11-29-02 at 07:00 PM.]