Friday, September 6, 2013

How to: Remove 'Search Results, LLC' from Internet Explorer. The Disable button is not editable

I recently was using someone else's PC with a different logon and they had all sorts of malware on the PC. No wonder the internet was always slow for that person...  There was one browser add-in that was clearly malware even though they pretend not to be. The program was called 'DefaultTab' aka 'Search Results, LLC'.

The thing that sucks about this one add-on to Internet Explorer is that you don't have the option to Enable/Disable it (Figure 1). It is essentially on your IE as a permanent 'feature'. What sucks even more is that its a poorly coded add-on. The code behind it is sloppy and buggy with the newest release of IE. The things I read online about getting rid of it were pretty complex, a pain, and didn't work for me.

The below video was pretty much how things went down. Get off my plane! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118571/)




Here are the steps to get rid of it:
  1. Uninstall the 'DefaultTab' program from Windows (Control panel -> Uninstall a program)
  2. Navigate to C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\' (Figure 3)
  3. Delete the 'DefaultTab' folder (Figure 3)
Doing the above got rid of this thing for me. Pretty simple. Not too crazy. Hope it helps someone else out.

Figure 1 - The 'Search Results, LLC' program not allowing for Enabling/Disabling in IE Add-ons

Figure 2 - Remove the 'DefaultTab' program from installed programs. Note it is missing in this screenshot as I already removed it

Figure 3 - The 'DefaultTab' folder is what we need to delete


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