Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Hotbar question

Here in the teachers' lounge we use Internet Explorer something or other to surf the net. All of a sudden this annoying hotbar is popping up just under the address line, and I can't figure out how to get rid of it permanently. I've figured out how to get rid of it temporarily - you go to View, then Toolbars, then unclick Hotbar. But every time you open up an IE window, there it is again, and you have to go through the whole rigamarole to get rid of it. I'm not the only person who is peeved at it. So how do I permanently get rid of it??

Melisma (under her Rock, with steam coming out of her ears)

Well, it depends on the hotbar. If it's anything like Google's or Yahoo's bar, it'll either be listed in Add/Remove Programs, or there will be an uninstall option on one of the buttons in the hotbar. That's the first place to look. If you don't see an uninstall option anywhere, then it might be evil evil adware, which you can remove with Ad-Aware .

Thanks, Karen - I went into Add/Remove Programs, and there it was - Hotbar.com...

Suppose (if one of the ignorant teachers I work with didn't download it) that it was prolly adware - we don't have a firewall here, or (as far as I can tell) a virus scanner. I've been raising a ruckus for us to get both, because those same ignorant teachers are constantly downloading stuff from Kazza and Morpheus and other potentially troublesome programs, and I'm really nervous about having our internet computers unprotected like this.

But it's hard to know who you have to bug to get it done, and well, I'm only here for a little over four months more, so as long as we don't get attacked in that time, it won't be my business after that - and maybe if they have a catastrophe like a virus, they will get smart and have more restrictions on the kinds of things you can access from here...

Melisma (under her Rock, knowing she is mean and uncaring, as long as it won't affect *her* - bad attitude to have, right?)

Well after I deleted it, I went away for a while and when I came back, there it was again. I'm going to have to run the utility you mentioned, Karen, because it's truly annoying!

Melisma (gnashing her teeth, here under her Rock)

It was included in a recent upgrade of IE, IIRC. That's why so many people are getting it now. Stupid Microsoft. I got it at work too, and our computers are dumb terminals there so they are slower then heck. It takes like a minute for a popup to close, and we don't have the control panel there so we can't do anything about it. Grrr...although IT finally fixed it. Hotbar is evil adware, and the fact that Microsoft packages it with their regular upgrade makes it even more evil.

You might want to get SpyBot, which deleted spyware and adware. It's free. You can go to www.download.com and search. Get the current version. You may have to download an upgrade, it froze on my computer at first (I have windows XP), but then I ran the automatic upgrade and it worked. Anyway, I finally got rid of that stupid hotbar thing at home too.

I downloaded Ad-Aware, as several people recommended to me, and installed it. But now it stalls halfway through the scan. What should I do about that? I've made sure that all the extraneous other programs aren't running in the background, BTW...

Melisma (under her Rock, dying to get rid of popups and adware and all the other crap we have here)

See if there are any updates for it. Check the program to see if there is an "automatic update" option or the website you downloaded it from. This happened to me w/ Spybot and they had a patch for it.