Some of you may not be feeling comfortable in using Toolbar Cleaner because it comes with adware in the installer itself. Moreover it lists all plugins, BHO, and toolbars found on the web browser rather than displaying only potentially unwanted programs. A wrong decision could cause you to lose some of the legitimate plugins which you will have to manually reinstall again. Leofelix has suggested another adware cleaner for web browser that is called AdwCleaner. It is created by Xplode and it doesn’t have an official website for the tool but is officially hosted at a French website called Général Changelog Team.
AdwCleaner is a free and portable adware cleaner that claims to delete adware, PUP (Potentially Unwanted Programs), toolbars and homepage hijackers. If AdwCleaner works as claimed, then it is much more powerful compared to Toolbar Cleaner.
As a test, I’ve installed Babylon Toolbar, SweetIM and Complitly through a third party software installation on a Windows 7 system that has Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 11, and Chrome 18 installed. Safari and Opera are not included in the test because they are not vulnerable to being hijacked by adware. I noticed the default homepage and search engine are being modified (hijacked), with toolbars appearing after the address bar.
I ran AdwCleaner and it presents me with 3 main buttons which is Search, Delete and Uninstall. The Search button will look for any known adware by AdwCleaner and displays the log file after finished searching. By default the log file is saved to C:\ drive and you can investigate the detected services, files, folders, registry, and web browsers that contains entries of adware.
Now you can click the Delete button to start removing the found traces of adware. Please make sure that you’ve saved all your work and close any running programs before clicking the Delete button or else AdwCleaner will automatically terminate the running programs before cleaning and restarts your computer when the cleaning process has been completed. A report will open when Windows is started showing you the item that has been successfully deleted.
Firefox and Chrome is totally clean from the adware while Internet Explorer’s search is still being hijacked by searchcompletion.com. Another gripe that I have against AdwCleaner is it changes the Internet Explorer default home page to Google.fr which is the France version of Google Search and everything is in French. Would be much better if they change it to Google.com and we will automatically be redirected to our country’s Google Search. I would say that AdwCleaner does a much better job than Toolbar Cleaner but there’s still room for improvement.
AdwCleaner is supported in Windows XP, Vista, 7 versions both 32 & 64 bit.