Junk software! In fact ByteFence IS “Malware, Spyware and Crapware for Free”! I never allowed it on my PC, allthough it came with another piece of software like through a backdoor. And it’s a headache to remove it.
Jake Doe at Ugetfix well described neccesary addtional steps to remove it. In a few words you should complete this uninstallation with regedit as follows:
Locate and remove all registry entries that belong to ByteFence. Search for the files located in folders:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\ ByteFence
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\ ByteFence
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run\\egui
Then delete all ByteFence related files in the following folders:
C:\\Program Files\\ ByteFence
C:\\Document and Settings\\All Users\\Application Data\\ ByteFence
C:\\Documents and Settings\\%USER%\\Application Data\\ ByteFence
Finally, delete Search.ByteFence.com plug-in from your web browser and reset its settings to default.
But even after that you’ll have a lot of traces of this f… piece of sh…. in yor registry. Damn!
The real issue is:
1. nobody realizes that in Windows the very first “user” created upon installing is “root” then nobody creates another “user” with lower permissions to just “use” the PC without changing system files. Yes, since some time now Windows opens a pop-up asking for applying the changes. Like people read the text inside pop-ups, that opens all the time, mostly for legit reasons.
2. since the beginning Windows was designed so everybody can give you a piece of software that “installs” with the ability of adding, removing, changing any part of your system. The “installation” is a procedure decided only by the guy who made the executable “setup” package and, once executed, it runs independently from anything else. This is the very reason why you can’t actually “uninstall” stuff from Windows, unless the guy above cares of it and make some effort. This is stupid by design, for the same reason Windows exposed many network services to the Internet like it was a trusted network. You got some worm then you discovered Windows requires a firewall just to separate your local network from the Internet. And since you don’t want to annoy “the user”, besides the said above post-mortem pop-ups, everything is hidden under some “automatism”.
3. backup your data. Ok, but the real damage is once you get some malignant code on your PC you can’t trust it any more, so you must erase and replace everything with a fresh install. Problem is reinstalling Windows, plus drivers, plus each single program and configuring everything back as before is an HUGE task. Last time I had to do that, it took 3 days. Yes, disk images. Usually they are even less useful than backups. 🙂
You’re absolutely correct regarding 1, 2 and 3. Since I have to deal with various and at times suspicious pieces of software, backup is a must. It takes less than to 2hrs to creare the full image of my SSD and it did saved me a few times already. Plus I have some number of cloud storages for all my stuff.
Problem is backups and disk images are something you do only in a serious work environment and even there, I saw it failing some times because when you need the backup, you found it stopped working some days before and nobody noticed or you had the backup for a week before, a week after and nothing in between. In an home or small office situation, backups and disk images are quite rare. I guess it is becoming more common to have data mirrored on some remote “cloud” service.
My own personal solution was to ditch Windows and move to Linux. Yes, it is not for everybody, yes there are many drawbacks but in my own experience that solved all the issues I had before. Among those issues, being forced to buy a new computer to upgrade the OS. Speaking of that, why did you went back to XP instead of some Linux low-hadware distribution?
I found two major advantages:
1. installing Linux from ground up is much quicker than Windows because the basic system comes all together with the install and then you can add missing software from the Internet with the package manager (like “apt install whatever”).
2. “backups” are just copies of files that you can move back and forth, given the fact that almost always config files are plain text.
Plus, of course, you don’t need any “utility” from third parties. Windows is just fine until you don’t install some crapware because you were told it made you system safer, faster, etc.