Remove HotBar

What is HotBar ?

HOTBAR is promoted as an application that adds graphical skins to Internet Explorer toolbars and outlook/ Outlook Express, and also adds its own toolbar. It monitors all URLs you visit to add link buttons to its toolbar dependent on the site you are HOTBAR's toolbar installs dynamic buttons on the left-hand side leading to advertisers' and/or paid search sites dependent on the site you are currently viewing as well as the keywords detected on the current site. If HOTBAR's toolbar is not removed (form View|Toolbars), it will add buttons on the left-hand side leading to advertisers' sites, often competitors of the site you are visiting. HOTBAR works with third party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our web sites and use the Service, including the toolbars. Two of these third parties are DoubleClick and Engage. Such companies may use information about your visits to our and other web sites and use of the Service, including the toolbars, in combination with non-personally identifiable information about your purchases and interests from other online and offline sources, in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. In addition, we share web site usage information about visitors to our web sites and users of the Service, including the toolbars, with such companies for the purpose of managing and targeting advertisements and for market research analysis on our web sites and the Service, including the toolbars. HOTBAR and its third-party advertising companies may note some of the pages you visit on our web sites, and through use of the Service, including the toolbars, through the use of pixel tags (also called clear gifs). In the course of serving advertisements, third-party advertisers may place or recognize a unique "cookie" on your computer and, in some cases, collect data through the use of cookies. HOTBAR, from time to time, may work with email direct marketers such as Netcreations to offer users the opportunity to subscribe to various email newsletters subscriptions. HOTBAR is bundled with older releases of iMesh and other free software, more recently, advertised through junk e-mail purporting to be a Microsoft upgrade to Outlook as well as other email spam methods using a drive by download technology to install itself.

HotBar variants

Hotbar offers a free version and paid version that is "advertising" free. However when choosing the paid version option Hotbar began installation via an ActiveX applet of their complete program suite BEFORE the transaction was completed.

Therefore the consumer receives the advertising-filled Hotbar installations without paying for the program and loses the ability to change his or her mind about purchasing the product before making payment. Once the consumer has committed to the payment checkout webpage they will receive the Hotbar suite of applications with advertising. This suite includes “Hotbar Web Tools” and “Hotbar Outlook Tools”

A toolbar was displayed in the top hand of the browser window displaying yellow icons. These icons are all sponsored links (advertising). A query was run through the "search engine" with the string "test search". Hotbar responded with five sponsored results and no organic results.

Further testing with other common search strings displayed results from Overture, an advertising service owned by Yahoo and no organic results on the first page. Therefore, it would be more accurate to classify Hotbar’s free search engine as an advertising search engine as each link generates revenue for HotBar and Hotbar is only searching results in which they receive revenue.

Of more important note is that certain phrases seem to be filtered out of HotBar search. For example the search for the term Hotbar, Remove Hotbar, Uninstall HotBar, Delete Hotbar, all return no results found although the same query in Overture, their primary syndicator shows these results.

Hotbar does offer a button in the upper left hand menu called Premium where the user can complete the purchase and remove the advertising services. In addition to this button in the Outlook tools HotBar offers a graphical button called VIP. This takes the user to a splash page touting the benefits of owning HotBar by making a purchase.

HotBar behavior

Shows ads
Changes browser
Stays Resident
Connects to the internet

HotBar Removal Instructions:

Remove Hotbar, it Should be removable from 'Add/Remove Programs' on the Control Panel, under the name 'HotBar' or 'Web Tools by Hotbar'.

Version 3 of the software leaves some mess behind in the registry, which can be cleaned up by running regedit and deleting these keys :

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Hotbar HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Hotbar HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Hotbar HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\B195B3B3-8A05-11D3-97A4-0004ACA6948E HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform\Hotbar 3.0

You can also delete the 'HotBar 3.0' string from HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent

HotBar Removal