If you’re not familiar with the program know as Agloco (http://www.agolco.com) and their history, Agloco is a spinoff of a failed “Paid to Surf” program called AllAdvantage. The premise of the company’s business is that they pay members to surf webpages for a few hours a day using their “toolbar” software. If you have been following the Agloco saga, they had a massive recruitment drive in 2006 yet failed to produce a product (the toolbar) and encouraged members to heavily recruit new members into their downline to earn commissions from those referrals in the future. Almost six months later, Agloco has finally released their toolbar to the anticipation of their members.
I downloaded my copy of the Agloco Toolbar and installed it on one of my old laptops that I use as a backup and is clean of any virus and spyware. My first impression with the Agloco toolbar was not pleasant due to the fact that a “toolbar” should be a “toolbar” and what Agloco has designed is an application that resizes the windows on your desktop to make room for itself and uses Internet Explorer to make calls to webpages whenever a member clicks on a link in the toolbar. I won’t even bother to get into the discussion of why I only use Firefox and I don’t even like Internet Explorer to be booted on my computer, but that was a second really big turnoff for me with the Agloco product.
The big suprise came when I restarted my laptop with Agloco installed and as windows was starting I got a Windows Scripting error and a virus alert from my anti-virus that there were four infected files on my computer. I was extremely suprised to see a virus alert because I rarely ever see thm, especially on my backup laptop where I am not running any mail clients or file sharing apps, not even an mp3 player. I also noticed a swarm of IE link shortcuts on my desktop that said “Free Computer”, “Get Your Free iPhone”, “Free Cruise to the Bahamas”, etc…. Evidently the Agloco software had installed these shortcuts much as you’d see when you buy a new PC. Another strike against Agloco for using that type of marketing strategy embedded in their software.
The real horror began after I allowed the computer to just sit with no applications running except for the Agloco Toolbar. I left the machine alone for about an hour and when I returned, the machine had completely frozen up and there were hundreds of Internet Explorer windows open on the desktop. Considering that IE had not been opened on that particular computer in ages, I knew immediately what piece of software had been recently installed and was causing this problem. I did a hard reboot on the laptop, got through the same virus alerts, and this time I didn’t launch Agloco software, however the Agloco application just minimized itself to the system tray. I hate when applications don’t listen and obey my requests. If I close an application, I want it closed, not minimized to the system tray. Anyway, I decided to let it sit in the system tray and see what happened. Again, after an hour, the desktop was full of IE windows, regardless of the fact the Agloco app was minimized to the toolbar. So, I tried another hard reboot and this time I closed the Agloco application, clicked on the icon in the system tray and closed the application from there and made sure there were no Agloco processes running in the Windows Task Manager, and left the machine for about an hour. To my horror, when I returned, once again the system was loaded with IE windows, mostly to the same sites as the previous times.
I am now in the process of completely removing the Agloco Toolbar from my system and will be testing if there is any residue left behind when the application is uninstalled. If I experience any problems getting rid of this nuisance application, I’ll be sure to write a blog post with instructions on how to completely remove this malware.
I highly recommend anybody reading this who is on the fence about downloading and installing the Agloco Toolbar to stay away from it. It is nothing but spyware, malware and a virus rolled into one.
I downloaded Viewbar and works fine ! No viruses or spyware tec..
Open -close , no problems !
Viewbar upgrade is available now toi fix some problema members had , but not me !
My works fine and ill intend to keep it !
Thanx !
Yes, but please remember. the “toolbar” is not a toolbar. It is an application with full access to your system. If it were a browser “toolbar” as anticipated, the application would have restrictions on it’s access to your system.
I have nothing personal against Agloco, and I have quite an extensive downline, however, if I’m responsible for them, I’m not going to lie and say things are great when they are miserable.
I’m curious to hear som other people respond if they feel the same way, from a developer’s perspective.
interesting, I am using the agloco toolbar too. did not have any problems. but i am always suspect when it comes to these things. have not had a virus show up yet.
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Interesting. I didn’t have too much of a problem, but like you, I too didn’t like the fact that it opened IE by default. Then, whenever I launched NBA Live 2007, it started automatically, which was very annoying!
I downloaded the agloco toolbar and totally regretted it. I’m not especially computer literate so I cannt really describe what it did but it wrecked my lovely laptop and I had to buy a program to fix to problem. It’s almost 100% now but it took me 2 days and $34 US dollars and there is still a small issue I’ll have to address when I get up courage again! (something about newer word documents not opening without first opening an old word document) I had some really weird things happening like a webpage just repeating itself over and over and over like a stack of cards, lots of crashes where I had to restart my computer, also it made my screen wobble and sometimes lfet blank areas in it..
I sent the company an email but they just said no one else had a problem with the tool bar. I would advise people not to go with them.
I’ve been having no problems with the one I downloaded.
http://www.agloco.com/r/BBCY2816
http://www.downloadagloco.net
Jay,
You are aware posting your referral link in blog comments is generally considered to be spam. Needless to say, I don’t there are many educated people who are reading this particular blog that are going to believe you considering you are either unaware that this is not acceptable, or that your intentions are to purposfully post your referral link.
I have been using the toolbar for a little more than a month now and I haven’t noticed any problems. Like you, I am extremely careful about viruses or trojans on my beloved laptop and hence I scan every .exe or other potentially dangerous files for any malware before I install them.
Where did you download the toolbar from? I got mine from the tucows network, which is safe because they check for any viruses or spamware before any files are uploaded there.
Jason, you may have a later version of the toolbar. I downloaded mine directly from Agloco in the first few days of release as did most of the people complaining about the virus issues. Obviously there have been several updates to the software thus far.
I think many are not accusing agloco directly but in my opinion the toolbar is still dangerous because it requires direct TCP/IP connectivity to function and is not a real *browser* plugin which would only be allowed to function within the paramaters of the browser.
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I have agloco adds popping up all over my firefox and i didnt download the toolbar and thier is no sign of it in add or remove programs anyone who downloads any of these search bars is a moron or slightly retarded they are almost all spyware and monitor your activity stupid people that use this crap just give them a reason to keep making this bulls**t wise up people
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Interesting post. Funny now that Agloco kind of didn’t fulfill the hype it brought about when it first started.