I don't know what happened. But it won't happen to me again.
Trust me, I would not recommend it when there would be a shadow of a doubt for me that this program wouldn't be 'kosher'.
As already mentioned, I am dealing with these kind of things for a living and I can not afford to recommend anything to customers that would even remotely cause a hassle as you described. This rather sounds to me that your system either was still "possessed" by some malware, with quite few known to prevent or divert from installing anti-malware software. Or that you in your frustration misinterpret and/or drawing wrong conclusions on what is/was happening.
MalwareBytes is for me.
There's nothing wrong with MalwareBytes AntiMalware. It's just my professional experience that there is not a single program out there that will catch/eliminate everything.
In fact, as I think I already stated, I am using both programs in parallel/tandem, as they have different ways how they operate. Using both in combination (the interactive scan, not as resident programs!) has almost always found at least remnants of malware that the other has missed.
In the past I used to do this with a combination of SBS&D and Ad-Aware, but since the later came out with their 2007 version , which has become a bloated and ineffective behemoth, I don't use it anymore and replaced it in my toolkit with MB-AW...
There's a lot of stuff out there where folks are trying to make a quick buck preying on the people fear and inexperience with malware these days. Too many of those applications are not even remotely worth installing. Like all the crap that for example Best Buy's "Freak Squad" installs on their customer's PCs, just because they get a commission on each copy they install "for free" (or not).
I installed SpyBot right before I replaced the drive with a new formatted one.
To me Advertizing Robots included is NOT the same as freeware.
What exactly are you are talking about here? Included in Spybot S&D?
I never use anyone's tool bar.
I did not say that, it was just a quick example of what kind of software that Sbybot message is referring to...
A new thing is forced search engine switch. I installed the latest "freeware DAP", and it forced (tricked) me into setting SpeedBit to the default search engine.
Saw what it did, uninstalled it.
Yet it was there in many different ways. It took me a lot of google searches on "Get rid of SpeedBit Search" to FINALLY get rid of all the different ways it was re-setting my search engine, right after I reset the default to Google.
THEN I installed an earlier version, BEFORE they turned to the dark side.
This vicious freeware is NOT freeware like it used to be.
Too many people don't pay attention to what they are doing. Or don't realize what they are possibly getting into when they are offered something "for free", specially when installing actually something else...
Ralf
