No tattoos please…

I spent way too much time this weekend trying to remove the remnants of MyWebTattoo and FastBrowserSearch.com. MyWebTattoo is an application advertised on facebook, which a family member installed, agreeing at the same time to switch the default search provider to FastBrowserSearch.com, and to install SearchGaurd – which prevents you from ordinarily setting any of these changes back to the Windows defaults. This BHO (browser help object) was persistent, and would not give up it’s hold on my About:tabs page in IE (the new tab page). I tried about 3 hours of malware and spyware tools to no avail. There’s lots of info on the web on how to reset the after effects of this POS (piece of …), but nothing worked – including unregistering and re-registering DLLs. Finally – as much as it defies logic to do so – I reinstalled the scamware, and then was able to uninstall everything through control panel. So that’s the word to the herd – if you can’t uninstall fastbrowsersearch and searchgaurd – go to https://mywebtattoo.com/, reinstall the dastardly app, and then uninstall.