Boo. Hiss. Messenger Plus! sucks ass. I just spent the last couple hours removing the spyware it installed on the two computers that happened to have Messenger Plus! installed. And from the way IE is behaving, it’s not quite all gone. Of course I’m aware that you can decline any adware/spyware in the installer, at least for appearance purposes. I’ve done this with other programs without incident. But it’s simply BS with Messenger Plus! 3.

I declined it when I installed (duh), yet I have spyware/adware (it’s all the same sh** to me). I did let Messenger Plus update to a new minor version after install.

Also, this spyware is particularly heinous. That gawdamn search bar it puts in IE and the gigantic series of bookmarks it persists was very annoying, as I use a bookmark synchronization service across a number of computers. The uninstall instructions so graciously posted by “Patchou” on his/her forum simply did not work at all the way they were supposed to (my Messenger Plus! installer didn’t seem to think I had the sponsor installed). It took a couple reboots and no less than sweeps by 3 spyware removal programs to get this far. Of course, I didn’t figure out that it was Messenger Plus! that was re-running this crap after I cleaned it off until midway through the process, thanks to numerous posts by other people who were also side-swiped by “Patchou’s” shoddy software.

Anyway, just a warning to others. Goodbye and good riddance Messenger Plus! Guess I’ll give Trillian a try.