Fix: How to remove Trovigo.com, SearchProtect, restore Internet Options

Trovigo.com is an unwanted search engine hijacker that renders Internet Options of Windows / Internet Explorer inaccessible. To restore them on an older Windows XP installation, one way that I’ve found to work is to update Internet Explorer to a newer version, aka IE 8 (say via the embedded Windows Update facility or Microsoft Update website – http://update.microsoft.com)

The software is also probably related to a software (at least on the machine I was fixing) called "Search Protect", that is running a service and two other processes that one launches, that tries to stop you from killing it and from changing search engine option in the web browser. To remove that you can use Process Explorer from http://www.sysinternals.com:

1. Right-click the SearchProtect service and select Suspend (do the same for the two other processes it uses) to freeze it (breaks into the process with the debugger).
2. Right click the service node (that has the other two processes shown as children under it in the process tree) and select "Kill process tree".
3. Go to %ProgramFiles% (usually C:\Program Files) using Windows Explorer address bar (or type this in Start/Run… dialog and press OK) and remove the folder "SearchProtect"
4. Use free software like CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com) free edition (it has a tool to edit startup entries) or the really powerful Autoruns one to remove the now broken (since you deleted the software at step #3 references in various Windows settings that try to launch the SearchProtect software (Autoruns shows in yellow startup references to missing files, can right click and delete those entries).

HowTo: Remove Skype from Windows taskbar, keep as Taskbar tray icon

An annoying feature of Skype of recent Skype versions is that by default it shows an icon on the Windows taskbar apart from the one at the taskbar tray while you’re signed in. This also means it shows in the ALT+TAB key sequence when switching between open windows, which you might not always want to happen, since you may accidentally switch to it instead of the windows you’re working with at that moment.

If it (also) had an option “Keep Skype in the taskbar during a video conversation” it would be more useful I guess.

Luckily you can turn off that behaviour from Skype’s Tools/Options menu option, by going to Advanced and then Advanced settings part of it.