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Cursor Café

Lift the curse of Cursor Café once and for all

Without a doubt, one of the greatest things about the Internet is how customizable it can be. One can surf the Internet with a browser that has been themed in several different ways, and the number of add ons out there are simply staggering. The problem is that not every add on is worth having. In the case of the Cursor Café toolbar add on, many people find that once they install this program, they can't uninstall it.

What is Cursor Café?

Cursor Café is a toolbar that you install to work directly with your web browser. A toolbar sits on either the top or the bottom of your web browser window and adds extra bells and whistles to what the browser can do normally, such as adding pop up blocking capabilities or other such things.

In the case of Cursor Café, the toolbar will often hijack your browser and send it to web pages where a product is being sold. You will also get pop up windows that will ask you to purchase a variety of products. In some cases, Cursor Café can cause fake pop up computer scanning windows that tell you because you have several different viruses or spyware programs on your machine, you need to purchase one product or another right away to fix the problem.

What you might notice with Cursor Café

The Cursor Café toolbar tends to show itself in many different ways on your computer. First, you will likely notice a new bar added to the top of your browsing window. You can have Cursor Café for both Internet Explorer and for Mozilla Firefox and even for some other browsers, too. It may seem like the toolbar is helping you out at first by offering pop up blocking capabilities and other such functions, but it will become apparent in almost no time at all that you are better off without it.

Next, you may notice a cavalcade of pop up windows and pop up scanning windows that try to convince you to download and purchase a product from the Internet. This product will likely be an anti spyware or anti virus program that you are urged to buy right away or your computer will face certain doom. Don't let these pop up windows convince you, though. In almost all cases, these windows are giving you false reports of the files that aren't actually on your machine.

Finally, you may experience some browser hijacking with the Cursor Café toolbar. This means that when you try to visit your start page, you will likely be redirected to another web page, usually one trying to sell you something. There may also be indeterminate browser hijacks while you are clicking around the Internet. Many of these redirects happen with every 50 or 100 clicks you make, as well.

How did Cursor Café get there?

Programs like the Cursor Café toolbar end up on our computers in several different ways. First, they can be installed on purpose since the person installing it may not realize that the program is more trouble than its worth. Second, it could come packaged with another program that we downloaded. The music downloading program Kazaa was famous for this. In some cases, it could come as a dependant bundle, which means that if you downloaded program A, you must install and keep program B (a program like Cursor Café) installed on your computer, too. If you uninstall program B, program A will stop working. You could also have a website automatically install the Cursor Café toolbar on your computer without you knowing it, although with modern day anti virus programs, this happens with less regularity than it used to.

Removing Cursor Café

You have two choices when it comes to uninstalling Cursor Café from your computer. You can download and use a trusted anti spyware program like ParetoLogic's XoftSpySE and scan your computer on a weekly basis to keep unwanted programs away from your machine. Should you choose to do this, carefully examine your program choices. Read online reviews, and talk to others to see what they have installed on their machines. Evaluate each choice carefully, then select the right product to meet your needs.

Alternately, you can choose to manually remove the program from your machine. Please note that any manual removal of any program should only be done by a qualified computer expert. Since you will likely be asked to change your computer's registry, you should be fully versed in how the registry works before you attempt it. You should perform a complete back up of all of your files as well as a back up of your computer's registry before attempting any kind of manual removal of a program such as this. Only when the backup is complete should you consider starting a manual removal of any program.

First, stop the following processes:

starwareuninstall.exe
widgets725.exe
starware44.exe
starware43.exe
starware_305.exe
sinstaller.exe
9cc045af42.exe

Next, delete the following files from your system registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEsoftwaremicrosoftwindowscurrentversionuninstallstarware
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTclsid{2d51d869-c36b-42bd-ae68-0a81bc771fa5}
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTclsid{7bed0340-176b-44bc-915e-c21c1dd6f617}
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTclsid{ca356d79-679b-4b4c-8e49-5af97014f4c1}
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTclsid{d49e9d35-254c-4c6a-9d17-95018d228ff5}
HKEY_CURRENT_USERsoftwarestarware
HKEY_CURRENT_USERsoftwarestarwareoptions
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEsoftwaremicrosoftinternet explorertoolbar {d49e9d35-254c-4c6a-9d17-95018d228ff5}
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEsoftwaremicrosoftwindowscurrentversionexplorerbrowser helper objects{ca356d79-679b-4b4c-8e49-5af97014f4c1}

Delete the following DLL files:

starware.dll

Finally, delete the following files:

brand.bmp
star_16.ico
starwareconfig.xml
perflib_perfdata_288.dat
9cc045af42.exe
blocker.cur
widgets725.exe

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