The Cool Web
Search spyware is sufficiently devious and well-supported
that it requires a tool dedicated to removing just it and its variants
-- and even then it is touch-and-go on whether you have really removed
if from your system. You can download the free version of this utility,
which as sold in late 2004 by Merijn to a company called Intermute,
from the following site:
http://www.intermute.com/spysubtract/cwshredder_download.html
It is not yet
clear how well the Intermute supported version of
CWShredder will fair over time. Intermute is likely to have more
resources, but if they do not have an arrangement for continuing
support from Merijn, the ability to track and counter CWS innovations
could suffer.
If CWShredder
refuses to startup correctly, you probably have a verison
of CWS on your system that is aware of CWShredder and is blocking it.
In that case, download the following utility from PepMK (the author of
both Spybot Search & Destroy and FileAlyzer), run it first, then
try installing and running CWShredder again:
http://www.safer-networking.org/files/delcwssk.zip
For more
information on what is know about Cool Web Search -- it is not
all that much, but it is quite interesting -- go to this page:
http://www.tampatrib.com/MGBVV09P51E.html