Has Conduit hijacked your browser? Here are instructions fro deleting it>>!!!

Conduit sells search engines to sites that install the engine to hijack home  pages. I purchased a product from Ashampoo, and rejected the option to install  the Bing Ashampoo search bar, yet it was installed. The code of my hijacked home  page is http://search.conduit.com/?ctid=CT2475029&SearchSource=13. Conduit  evidently is in some partnership of revenue sharing of the hijacked home pages.  A Web of Trust search will show many complaints from users. Conduit Engine shows  up in my add/remove programs, but failed to uninstall, and the “uninstall” was  preceded by some direct script code that quickly popped up and then disappeared,  I assume so that the search bar cannot truly be uninstalled.
A Google  search of Conduit Engine will result in complaints by users who want to  uninstall the search engine, but are having problems.
Because my edit  varies greatly from the advertiser’s own description below, I will leave their  ad, until more research can be done, that justifies taking their advertising  down. Do be aware that they are associated with home page hijacking and spyware, to  persons who do not desire to have their engine. I have discovered this from Web  of Trust and Google. I hope to have my answer improved, once I have discovered  how to have their spyware removed. I welcome any answers that can improve upon  mine. I will also post how to remove the engine once I am successful.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_conduit_engine#ixzz1lbvRrEvj

 

Conduit bundles a hidden “toolbar” and other apps with other companies’ software,  pays them a kickback because they are willing to hide from the end user that  Conduit products are being allowed to install secretly alongside what the user  actually wanted.
The outcry is widespread but they seem to still be  getting away with it.
They pretend to address the issue here  http://www.conduit.com/Community/Forum/Questions.aspx?fpage=10&threadid=8423
But it is clear that the attempt is  disingenuous.http://forums.cnet.com/7723-6122_102-504164.html
In my  case, Bit Torrent did me the disservice. I thought they were still the open  source industry leader in free and reliable torrent apps, but I was clearly  mistaken. Had to uninstall secretly included addons in all browsers, as well as  removing toolbars and hidden client apps via Add/Remove function. Seems to have  worked. We’ll see.
Their claims are below…   ==================================
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_conduit_engine#ixzz1lbvdmEny

 

HOW to delete:

If you are using Firefox, uninstall it from the addons.
Users are reporting that Revo Uninstaller having success in uninstalling Conduit. Download Revo Uninstaller Freeware – Free and Full Download – Uninstall software, remove programs, solve uninstall problems

If it still will not delete/

 

Boot computer up into safemode and then delete it.  That shouod work.

 

1) To get rid of the Toolbar / widget things, you need to go to Tools > Add-ons > Plugins, and uninstall the two entries pertaining to BitTorrent and Conduit. You will need to restart Firefox twice for this. Check that they are both gone when you have restarted.

2) To remove the Search Box hijack, click on the down-arrow next to the search box (it will probably have a Google symbol next to it) and select Manage Search Engines. Then select any search engine you don’t like the look of or recognise – you will be surprised how many there are – and for each one click Remove.

3) They were the easy bits. Now to remove the Conduit Engine itself.

You need to have Firefox shut down for this, as it restores some of the files upon shutdown to prevent corruption. First, locate you Roaming Application Profiles. You will need to be an administrator to do this, but assuming you are, in Explorer select Tools > Folder Options > View tab (if Tools is not visible, hit Alt) and ensure the radio button for “Show hidden files, folders and drives” is selected and “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” is unchecked (you will be asked to confirm this).

Find your profile. This will be located in your home drive (probably C:) in the “Users” or “Documents and Settings” (for XP) folder, so in my case it is C:\Users\Keith. Ensuring you have Folder View open, click on the {profile} folder and in the right-hand pane locate AppData (or Local Settings\Application Data for XP). Within this is the folder “Roaming”, within which is the Firefox Profile folder, e.g. {profile}\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.

Beneath that is your random profile ID folder, which will be something like “1234abcd.default”. This folder I will call {fprofile}.

First, locate the pesky Conduit Engine folders, which contain most of the gubbins associated with this monster. Delete the folders {fprofile}\conduit and {fprofile}\CT2790392 (I can’t vouch for this exact number, but it seems to be standard at the moment).

Find the file {fprofile}\prefs.js and save a copy of this with a .backup extension. Right click on prefs.js and select “Edit”; this will (should) open the javascript file in Notepad.

You need to remove all references to Conduit:

First, delete every line beginning with the following:

user_pref("CT2790392. user_pref("CommunityToolbar.

Second, locate the following line:

user_pref("browser.search.defaulturl", "http://search.conduit.com/ResultsExt.aspx?ctid=CT2790392&SearchSource=3&q={searchTerms}");

Change it to (for Google search):

user_pref("browser.search.defaulturl", "http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=");

You will need to find the relevant command line for your own search engine, or just leave the second quotes empty for no URL bar searching.

Finally, locate the line:

user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://search.conduit.com/ResultsExt.aspx?ctid=CT2790392&q=");

and change it to (for Google): user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=");

Again, you will need to find your own code for different search engines: I’m not a huge fan of Google, but at least you can just delete the cookie to remove your search history, or use Private Browsing.

 

 

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