BleepingComputer.com: Ask.com default search removal

Papkid,
That did it... your last suggestion removed Ask as my default tool bar. Unfortunately I am still experiencing the same problem when trying to move from a search engine to the address I am searching for.... any suggestions?

Thanks again,
Uncas

Uncas, on Jan 13 2010, 02:15 PM, said:

Hi Uncas,
Glad that much has worked out for you.

I have highlighted part of your sentence because I believe this might be a cause of confusion and partially explain the inability of those trying to help to know exactly what the problem is and what to do about it. When working with computers it is often very important to use exact terminology, otherwise we can have a failure to communicate. What we just did was not remove the Ask toolbar but rather an Add-on (much like the extensions in Firefox). It's confusing, I know. Starting with version 7, Internet Explorer has included on its own toolbar an "Instant Search box". You can get different search providers for that search box from webpages like this one: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/search...en/default.mspx

But that is not the same thing as installing a toolbar. That would alter the appearance of IE more significantly. It would be more like downloading and installing any other software; you would have to go to a page like the following to download and install it: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/downloads.shtml
And as illustrated on that page, once installed the toolbar would be added to Internet Explorer that looks something like this:


I know you believe you went to ask.com to download the toolbar but as you've mentioned, it's been a while ago so I understand completely that your memory would be fuzzy about what you actually did. I'm thinking you just added a search provider to IE instead of installing the full toolbar--that would explain why you have no entry in Add/Remove programs. But if you did have the full toolbar installed that looks like the illustration let me know. Since you have Zone Alarm another possibility is that you allowed their SpyChecker toolbar to install which included an Ask.com search box--that would also explain why nothing from Ask appears in Add/Remove.

The same reasoning would also apply to Yahoo. You say it's disabled, which sounds like you are looking at its entry in the Search Providers' add-ons list. That doesn't tell me if the full yahoo toolbar is installed or not, which is what I was asking.

To cut thru the confusion of what you do actually have installed and what you don't--or at the least what you can see in Add/Remove, please do the following, since you have HijackThis available to you. It is perfectly safe to have HijackThis enumerate your Add/Remove list so it is OK to post the list here--just don't use it in any other way than specified as some people think HJT's Uninstall Manager can give you another way to uninstall programs, which it doesn't--it just removes icons from your Add/Remove list if you tell it to and is intended to remove orphaned icons from improperly removed programs.

1. Open HijackThis and click on Open the Misc Tools section.
2. Open Uninstall Manager.
3. Click Save list... and save the uninstall_list.txt file to your desktop or wherever is convenient for you.
4. Open the file, copy its contents and paste into your next reply.

Now--for your remaining problem, I am not really sure what causes that. I was getting similar problems with searches using Firefox, but I don't get an option to diagnose problem. I doubt if it's related to Ask.com but who knows. There is an Add-on in Internet Explorer's Add-on manager called Diagnose Connection Problems. You can try disabling that, but I doubt it will have any effect on getting the page not found result.

Does it happen every time you search? Mine was intermittent and pretty much disappeared a little while after upgrading from Firefox 2.x to 3.x. Now that you have removed Ask from your IE Add-ons and have another default, try it out for a while and see if it "settles down".

Also let me know how you go about searching. Do you always use the search box in IE? Or do you open a search page in your browser first then enter your search term? You can also search from the address bar, which is what many people use. This is when the registry key I had you examine earlier comes into play. If nothing else works, I may have you reset that reg key to default. Tho it shouldn't be related, sometimes modifying such things will fix a problem. This is also why I was asking about Yahoo, that reg key indicates Yahoo is set to be the search engine when you search from the address bar--which usually indicates that the Yahoo toolbar is installed or was at one time.