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RealPlayer 10.5 fiddling with Google Toolbar 4 without permission

At least I don't recall knowingly giving permission while updating my RealPlayer 10.5 installation. Noone should dare tell me that they just mysteriously appeared in an unrelated phenomenon.

Right now my Google Toolbar 4 installation in Internet Explorer is sitting shiny with a Rolling Stone dropdown button that wasn't there previously and a similar RealMedia icon that wasn't there previously either.

And here are the two offending icons. Clicking on the dropdown bit with one comes up with headlines, as if they were headline feeds, the other with tracks to listen to.

Poking around, these are 'custom buttons', so had I added them myself or added them with explicit permission, that'd have been my fault. Fine. But these weren't added as such. (That said, they seem rather innocent at first. Some technical information from Google Toolbar's options menu window: the Rolling Stone button says 'Sends your query to www.rollingstone.com when clicked' and 'Receives information from www.rollingstone.com periodically' and the Rhapsody.com one says 'Receives information from feeds.rhapsody.com periodically'. It still does not excuse what Real has done, though.)

This is damned immoral. It's wrong. It's as bad as spyware/badware, malware and home page hijacking. Losers. Anyone else had this?

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Comments

Like you, I just got the RS button after installing RealPlayer 10 - and I definitely didn't agree to it up front. I also got a "Listen to Free Music" button.

I'm really annoyed about this.

Anyone know how to remove them?

Hi, Michael.

What I did was this. Note that I mentioned the options menu -- that's that round green 'button' (it may be grey if you're not 'logged in' for Google Bookmarks and auto-login on some other Google services' websites). Click on that, then on 'Options...', then on the 'Buttons' tab. Then you're free to disable them forcibly installed Rolling Stone and Rhapsody buttons by unticking them. The 'Remove' button to (hopefully) get rid of them off the system should also help.

Sorry I wasn't clear in the original post above. I hope this helps!

Jonathan

And, thanks also Michael for reassuring me that I wasn't hallucinating when I saw the extra icons!

I've also been trying to remove these annoying buttons. They appeared when I upgraded to IE7 (while Firefox 2.0 works out its bugs). I uninstalled/reinstalled the Google toolbar, but it's still there. Does anyone know how to remove the damned RS/Rhapsody buttons? I don't want to look at a corporate pimp button everytime I look at my toolbar.

Sorry, Jonathan. I missed your instructions above. Thanks so much.

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