Removing “difficult” IE toolbars

A couple of days ago, I had a friend’s laptop (with Windows XP) at my place, because it was full of spyware (not viruses, thankfully), and hadn’t been “windowsupdated” in a long time.

After the normal procedures:

go to Add/Remove Programs, remove everything “bad” from there,
install AVG anti-virus,
run it (I didn’t know it didn’t have a virus at the time),
install Ad-Aware,
run it,
install SpyBot Search and and Destroy,
run it,
“attack” Windows Update

I found that there was still a toolbar in IE, that was not mentioned in Add/Remove Programs, and the anti-spyware programs didn’t remove it. Spybot has a feature to remove “stuff” from IE, but even that wasn’t able to remove that toolbar. It wasn’t one of the most “evil” ones (didn’t open popups in IE, from what I could see, and didn’t steal/redirect links), though it of course displayed “Gambling” and “Shopping” buttons prominently. And, naturally, it didn’t want to be uninstalled.

After a bit of Googling, I finally found this: ToolbarCop. Problem solved. I can recommend it in these cases (and no, that isn’t an affiliate link, view the source if you doubt me :)).

I still hope that person will use Firefox instead of IE in the future, but that’s another story.