Hotbar has always been annoying, and it's even more annoying that it
'upgrades' itself. Yesterday, I discovered on one of my users's
machines that it had downloaded the newest version of itself,
installed it, and then my user was unable to see our exchange servers,
or any of our internal IP addresses. I couldn't believe it. I looked
in the network card configuration, under TCP/IP, and even though the
adapter was set to use DHCP, it now had two new IP addresses for DNS
servers, and what's worse it DELETED the internal DNS servers from the
list altogether. I don't remembers the DNS servers that it was using,
because I was so feverishly trying to disable it. I'd disable it, and
look again 5 minutes later, and poof, hotbar had effectively
re-installed itself, and again changed the dns servers to it's own.
This actually caused my user to be unable to work! He claims that he
didn't install it knowingly, and somehow this doesn't surprise me.
The hotbar uninstaller (HBUninstFull.exe -- available from hotbar.com)
did successfully get rid of it, as opposed to deleting all of the
Apps, and DLL's (that weren't in use already) still allowed it to
install and re-configure the dns settings as I've said. This is
unbelievable, and I cannot understand why these guys don't get sued
back into the stoneage. After looking at the Terms of Service, it
mentions NOTHING about hijacking the DNS settings. Please let me know
if you have any more info on the evils of hotbar, and why it's legal
(or is it?) for them to change my DNS settings on my ethernet adapter.
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