Before you send off e-mails about some wild internet offer or conspiracy theory, check out snopes.com, The website for Urban Legends. It will give you the 411 regarding the truth or fiction of those crazy internet stories (and many other stories!).

A little while ago I wrote about a MSN Messenger ad-in called Messenger Plus. Wellllll, version 3 came out and I downloaded it and I wasn't happy at all. What got installed besides the program, was a nasty little toolbar called 'mysearchnow' (which I didn't even know was being installed at the same time).. The damn thing would take over my Google toolbar, pop up again even after I thought I had deleted it (Ad-Aware and Spybot had no effect on it!), take over my home page and was a general pain in the ass. Even after I thought I had defeated it, I found it still sitting in the background! If I clicked on 'tools-internet options-home page', it would show that up as 'mysearchnow/passthrough/homepage', which meant that I was getting to my home page, but still going through mysearchnow! Anyway, I finally got rid of it by deleting the Messenger Plus program itself, and then running all the spyware removal tools again. After looking at the message boards on Messenger Plus, It looks like you can install the program without this 'mysearchnow' being installed also. I guess it pays sometimes to read the fine print in the disclaimers!