HOTBAR

[Ted Hodapp]

How can I get rid of the ugly faces across the top of the
screen or HOTBAR???

[Patrick Pitre]

The best way to uninstall Hotbar is to use the Hotbar-
provided uninstall tool. Follow this link, and run the
program:
http://www.hotbar.com/downloads/HbUninst.exe

Is Hotbar spyware? While the brainy, in-the-know, types
debate that issue, you should protect yourself in the
meantime. Lately, my experience has been that machines are
being hi-jacked by internet parasites. These are programs
and scripts that are executed (mostly without you knowing)
on your machine. They bury themselves deep into your
system, change IE settings (like search pages), report
your personal info (including passwords, etc.) back
to "mother-ship" type servers, and generally cause much
havoc.

Some examples are Xupiter, Huntbar, comet cursor, and
search explorer.

Here are some helpful links for cleaning your machine:

Ad Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ - to see if there is
anything else on your machine that you might not want
(chances are you're going to find many, many items you had
no idea were there).

Here is my current favorite program for protecting my
machines. It's called Spybot. Not only will it check your
machine, but it has a nifty immunize feature that locks
down key components of your machine so you can avoid
future "infections". It also has links for further
lockdown tools (for the truly paranoid!), like ActiveX
protection.

http://spybot.eon.net.au/ Download the program, Spybot,
and run it.

Obviously, this is all third-party software that you use
at your own risk. Be careful that you don't delete
anything important. Read the documentation.

Good luck.

Patrick Pitre

>-----Original Message-----
>How can I get rid of the ugly faces across the top of the
>screen or HOTBAR???

>.
>