I seem to have picked up a search bar called “Intelligent Explorer Plugin”. It sits in the system tray and launches whenever I click on its stupid little icon. I did not ask for this “feature”, but it somehow got past ZoneAlarm and Norton AntiVirus. It doesn’t seem malicious, but I don’t want the &^%&% thing. I can’t find it in Contol Panel->Add/Remove Programs. It doesn’t exist in the Start Up menu. I can’t find it by searching. I have run AdAware 6.0 and it didn’t get rid of it (though it did dump a bunch of other cr%p for me).
Any one know how I can get rid of this thing?
This really hacks me off. Most civilized people would never bust into my home and leave something on my living room couch that I didn’t ask for. What gives these Internet businesses the idea that it is okay for them to sneak into my computer and leave stuff that I didn’t ask for? Do people really make money this way? Is it a good idea to begin your relationship with a potential customer by sneaking up on them? I would never do any kind of business with these “Intelligent Explorer” a**holes.
Hmm. A Google search on “Intelligent Toolbar” uninstall gives a bunch of hits, but most of them seem to be that you have to go to THEIR SITE and download an uninstaller. This would make me very, nervous…
Once you have succeeded in deleted the offending toolbar, dump IE as well. You won’t have such problems in Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera or Safari.
What I’d like to know is: How does this crap infect your computer in the first place? How do they sneak it onto your hard drive? Does it come from visiting certain web pages? If so, which kinds of pages are likely to infect? Or is it slipped in by some other means? What evasive action can you take?
Most of it sneaks in through browser exploits and ActiveX controls. Some gets installed along with programs of the verboten type, and some just appears.
And I second the call to switch to Firefox. Stable, fast and easy-to-use.
