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SweetIM is an utter bastard

There is a moral to the following story. It is that you should NEVER be over enthusiastic on the internet and go clicking links willy-nilly without paying enough attention.

On Friday, I decided to go about setting up DJ Format’s Youtube channel. A task which involved not only downloading already live Youtube videos, but also ripping from a DVD which came with his second album (and has been in my possession for the last 6 years). Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Nothing.

In the end, I downloaded no less than 4 different programs for decrypting, encoding and converting the videos.  Not knowing really where to start I asked a friend for help, he directed me to a site and I clicked the download button. Alas, I was in such a hurry and doing so many things at once that I failed to notice that download button was in fact an advert and I inadvertently downloaded and installed some piece-of-shit program called “SweetIM”. I then spent most of the rest of the night trying to destroy this utter bastard. It infected every browser, changing my default search engine and home page. Avast and Malwarebytes failed to pick it up, Spybot Search and Destroy noticed it and killed some of it’s registry files, but SweetIM is a clever bastard. It automatically reinstalled itself and added registry files again. You cannot just uninstall it, oh no, that would be too easy. No less than three times I used Spybot to kill it, only to have it reappear, in the end, I found someone on the internet who had posted the solution.

In order to remove SweetIM from your machine, you need to the following:

Goto control panel and uninstall the program (this won’t actually get rid of it).

Hit windows key + R.

Type Regedit.

CTRL + F.

Enter “Sweet” and click ‘Find Next’.

Right click and delete.

Repeat. Over and over and over, until it’s all gone. 

Then repeat this process again for ‘Funweb products’ and ‘mywebsearch’ and variations of those. 

You can also try HiJack this, but it’s a very aggressive program and shouldn’t be used by noobs.

That’s it, it should be gone, but I did a fresh install as well, just in case. I always feel dirty after an infection.

For more info - http://thatluxurylife.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-completely-remove-sweetim.html

Post By By Adrian Willings (851 Posts)

Adrian is a self-proclaimed geek with a love for all things tech (except Apple products). He works in the SEO industry for a living and loves how it's constantly changing and evolving. He finds social media fascinating, but is also enthralled by all sorts of other things including Android, VW's, gaming and being a Dad.

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