TSAdBot
TSAdBot, from Conducent Technologies (formerly TimeSink), is distributed with many freeware and shareware programs, including the Windows version of the popular compression utility pkzip. It downloads advertisements from its home site, stores them on your computer, and displays them when an associated program is running.
According to Conducent, tsadBot reports your operating system, your ISP's IP address, the id of the tsadBot- licensee program you're running, and the number of different ads you've been shown. It also indicates whether you have clicked on any of the ads. On installation, tsadBot may present an optional survey. If you answer the survey, your answers are conveyed along with the other information gathered by tsadBot. Conducent's privacy statement is available for viewing.
The install program for pkzip for Windows 2.70 clearly states that the product integrates "sponsored messaging technology" that will make use of your Internet connection, and identifies Conducent Technologies as the source. The program also describes precisely what information will be sent to the Conducent home site. Furthermore, pkzip's uninstall program removes tsadBot, as long as no other programs are relying on it. Unfortunately, this degree of candor is rare; many other programs install and use tsadBot without ever informing the user.
To determine whether this program is present on your system, click Find on the Start menu and search all local drives for files named Tsad*.*. If tsadBot is present, you will find Tsad.dll in the Windows folder and Tsadbot.exe in another folder, probably C:\Program Files\TimeSink\AdGateway. Subfolders below the AdGateway folder contain user profile information as well as the downloaded ads.
If you want to remove tsadBot, you must first uninstall all programs that rely on it. You're effectively paying for these programs by allowing them to show you banner ads, so in all fairness, you should remove them. (If fairness is not sufficient incentive, consider that these programs will not run in tsadBot's absence!) In most cases, uninstalling the related programs will not remove tsadBot itself, so you'll have to delete Tsad.dll and the entire AdGateway folder using Windows Explorer. Explorer may refuse with an Access denied message; in that case, restart Windows and try again. If you still can't delete them, restart the computer in ms-dos mode and delete these files using the command line.
I have now removed this annoying and intrusive program from my system twice. I know this is "old news" but it is trully annoying and given it looks like I purchased a piece of software (0n cd, in a reputable store) that has this stinker on it! I'll be contacting that vendor for confimation of my suspicions and if they prove so, there goes my business to someone else.