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ViewPoint Toolbar Removal

Overview:
ViewPoint Toolbar will hijack your search queries and also transmits non personally identifiable information back to their servers (It's still data therefore spyware as far as I'm concerned.) Here is a quote from the download.com review.

"This free toolbar offers a way to save bookmarks in visual form, as well as a fairly capable pop-up blocker. The Viewpoint Toolbar has an attractive, compact interface that quickly expands when necessary. For example, if you want to view screenshots of bookmarks, you simply click a button to scroll through all images. Though the thumbnails are rather small, they are big enough to give you a general overview of a page's contents. The thumbnails have as annotation text from the search results, so you can quickly understand what a page is about. The pop-up blocker was mostly effective in our tests, except with floating ads, though its performance seemed a bit slow. You can specify whether to allow ads from a certain site and whether to display an icon and play a sound when the toolbar blocks ads. You'll also find a basic search function powered by Yahoo's engine. Since it offers a rather unique way to store bookmarks and doesn't cost a dime, we can see how Viewpoint Toolbar makes a beneficial addition for many Web surfers."

Unlike a lot of the crap we see around here this does offer something that is somewhat useful.

This program does have an uninstaller under add/remove programs. Please use that as your first option.

End Processes (may or may not exist):
mtsaxinstaller.exe
viewmgr.exe

Unregister DLLs:
Tip:
this is only a list of known files/locations. You will want to do a search by the name of the file to see if they're on your system.
A while back I wrote a guide to Register/remove DLL or AX files which you will need if you don't know how to unregister these files.

Each file is in several locations so you'll need to search for them and unregister + delete them in every location you find.

axmetastream.dll
swfview.dll
viewbar.dll
viewbarbho.dll

Remove Directories:
%programfilesdir%\viewpoint\
%profiles%\application data\viewpoint\

Clean your Registry:

You should be back to normal IF this was your only problem. I suggest you post in our HJT forum since its not likely that this is your only bug. Read this first


Written By: Martin Krohn
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