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How to Remove Sweetpacks SweetIM Toolbar from Your Firefox Browser
Like any conspiracy, if most reasonable persons claim that something is fishy then you better be suspicious. I am no techno geek but I have arrived at the conclusion there is some amount of credibility to the claim that SweetIM behaves like spyware. Most persons who are caught with this imposter on their computer would like to have it removed but it is such a bother until you find out how. The purpose of SweetIM is for you to be able to send fancier smiley-faces and graphics to friends who themselves must take the time to install SweetIM in order to enjoy them. What a bother. According to the promo page by Sweetpacks the software has 150 million users worldwide. Count me out!
I just want to know how to get rid of this pest from Sweetpacks?
You go to Control Panel and do a simple Uninstall, only to discover that it is still there in your browser with its childish glory of emoticons in a colourful large square. So you figure that somewhere on a planet somewhere there are persons who want to use these lovely emoticons but they are not for you. You return to Control Panel and take a good look at the software in your list and there is no sign of SweetIM. You close and reopen Firefox and the friendly emoticons are still on offer.
This is where most laymen would call in the neighbourhood geek. But at this point I made the decision that if it were not a deeply embedded malware then I should be able to remove it. I deleted all cookies and went back online only to find the leering emoticons.
But I persisted in my search to remove IM toolbar from Sweetpacks from Firefox browser and would not stop until I succeeded in clearing out the infernal pest.
Remove SweetIM From Firefox Browser: The Steps
- Go to Control Panel and Uninstall. Done that and still there?
- Explore the Firefox>Tools>Options>General; and sure enough my Homepage setting had been hijacked by that impish knave SweetIM. I simply replaced it with Yahoo News and I am good to go. Get that? Homepage. Change to something useful like your favourite news site. Restart browser and the IM toolbar is still there.
- There was another trap inside the toolbar drop down menu which I had to go into the Manage Toolbars submenu in order to remove. And they say this thing is not a malware. Because i dont have that particular toolbar anymore I am a bit cloudy now on what that trap was; just be aware that you can go into that submenu as well in order to fight the battle to keep your PC clutter free and free from malware.
Comments
Author@tea4two
Thanks for contribution to discussion. Did you read the entire article? I tend to go on a bit but when I mentioned control panel I meant to uninstal programmes. As you know doing the uninstal alone does not cure the problem. Yes I agree with you that a cleaner is the ultimate solution because of my experience with Babylon malware.
This is not a technical forum so we have to be careful how we tell other readers to mess about registry manually because it can crash your operating system if you don't know what you are doing.
Dangerous to mess with registry if you don't know what you are doing.
I may have to rewrite the article with neat simple steps plus options.
Or enjoy the organic flow of evolving discovery.
I had the same problem. Could not get rid of it's toolbar in both Firefox and Explorer after uninstalling it in programs and running anti virus and Malwarebytes (which is seems really good usually) and even uninstalling and re installing firefox, until I found hints here http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201...
What finally worked for me was the AdwCleaner
from the http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleane...
link.
The sweet im toolbar and re directing (it would not let me search in anything except Bing) seems to be gone now. Hopefully for good.
Okay that is not that simple, the sweet im is in your register and you need to move it from there. and then delete it from your machine and then on top of that go to the computer-programs and delete the folder that has other information in it. The best uninstaller that works good is the one who created the advance window care and that will run the natural uninstaller of the program and run a scan to remove the stuff left over. also I would download bleachbits to clean out your temps files which are too many to name. Just remove your homepage back to something will not stop it because it is also hook to your search engine and therefore will come back up. To just cleaner your toolbars by just hiding it will not go away. you need to clean it completely out of your system and the above is the only way
- Author
May do a hub on Babylon malware as well, but until then here is a hub by another hubber: https://hubpages.com/technology/How-to-Uninstall-B...
And a useful article from elsewhere: http://malwaretips.com/blogs/remove-babylon-search...
- Author
Perry, P and MurMure:
You're welcome. Happy to be of help. Keep the circle of knowledge going.
And feel free to share the article.
Gee that works, man you saved my life
thx Subodh 4,
it nearly drived me crazy! thank you so much!!
Big thanks to Subodh! (And to the writer of the original article.)
- Author
subodh:
Thanks for your expert input. Used it to change a browser I did not care to have as default.
Thanks for warning too. The computer carries a special warning for this menu as well.
At times, you will not SweetIM in your addons... in that case following works for Firefox:
1. In address bar, type -- about:config
2. Be careful as you are chaging the settings of your browser
3. Search for "keyword"
4. Then, change the value of 'keyword.URL' from SweetIM URL to google URL
http://www.google.co.uk/#output=search&q=
This will solve the prob...
Thank You,
Subodh
I ran into this suspicious product on two computers simultaneously. The two users were working on a project together, but, long story short, other than the human side of the project itself, they did shared no data.
As far as I can tell, it is a trojan adware. It may sometimes be linked to MyPhoneExplorer, a good product for Android and some other phones.
Regardless, I was able to get rid of it with a mix of user accessible uninstall techniques (control panel, and the settings options in multiple browsers).
In these instances, it installed two or three applications per infection that could be removed with Control Panel and installed search engines, tool bars etc. on either or both Chrome and IE.
If it walks like a trojan and acts like adware...
- Tom
- Author
What have you tried so far?
iam deeply felt the same way........please somebidy do thing .....
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