I realise I'm obviously a n00b to you all, but I can assure you I'm not stupid. I had troubles with the toolbar, but I've managed to get rid of it. Let me set the scene, I was sorting out a friends computer, and had already installed & run both Ad-Aware & Spybot S&D before I even realised that the toolbars were courtesy of MSN Messenger (cos she hadn't read the installation details closely enough!). So, I was in a rather screwy place, but then I found these forums. I searched and found advice from the creator of Plus and figured, well that ought to work so I did what I was told:
quote:
Reinstalling with the sponsor and uninstalling again is supposed to work though.
However I can assure you (and this is especially for Patchou, so he knows) reinstalling Messenger with the sponsor & then uninstalling Messenger did NOT get rid of the toolbars. Before the inevitable flood of questions/criticism I will say that YES I did close down Internet Explorer before doing either of these things. The problem appears to be that not all the necessary processes are stopped when you close IE down.
So then I tried something else:
quote:
You need to download the one from the webpage and run it.
http://lop.com/new_uninstall.exe
That uninstaller will remove ALL traces of the sponsor even on damaged installations.
That is the cure all of cure alls and works 100000% everytime
Sorry to dent your enthusiasm Cyrus, but this didn't work either - hell I even ran it in safe mode and it did nothing. As soon as I restarted my computer the bars were back.
So, how did I get rid of it, well, I googled for "Lop toobar removal" (without the quotes) and discovered that it's one of the more nefarious Ad systems out there. It appears that there are a number of different variations of the toolbar, and I believe the one I got was Lop/Active. Anyway, it turned out all I had to do was delete any oddly named folders & files in the "Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data" folder, however this may not be the same for you, as some installations appear to need registry editing (in fact I did do a little bit of registry editing aswell). I will point you to a particularly helpful page, but be aware that this is a Google cached page as the original page no longer exists for reasons unknown, and I've no idea how long Google holds things in it's cache.
The page is
here. It is someone's journal or something, but there are hundreds of replies and you'll no doubt find what you need there. If you don't, do the Google search I mentioned and look around. There are a few programs ad-killing programs around that appear to work against the Lop toolbar, but I couldn't find one that didn't charge me for removing it from my system (though they'll happily detect it for you!!).
Hope this helps all who need the help and are finding, as I did, that reinstalling messenger or using Lop's own uninstaller weren't working. I would stress though that you should try these methods first.
Good luck!
