Reference number: CH000453

What is Whagent?

Question:

What is Whagent?

Additional information:

As of June 2001, Whagent has been installed on over seven million computers. Whagent is a product of the WebHancer company used to collect information about a users while they are browsing the Internet. This program is loaded as a TSR and is generally installed as an additional install when installing various Internet utility programs such as:

• Audio Galaxy

• iMesh

• Wildcat web optimizer

• BeFaster Internet Speed Up Toolkit

Note: This program currently appears to only be installed on PC compatible computers running Microsoft Windows.

Answer:

Computer Hope highly recommends that this utility be uninstalled as we consider it to be an invasion of a user's privacy; uninstalling it will hopefully only prevent other companies from using these types of practices and/or services.

To completely uninstall this utility, please follow the below instructions:

1. Click Start / Settings / Control Panel and double-click on Add/Remove programs.
2. If present in Add/Remove programs, remove the program. If this program is not present in Add/Remove programs but is listed when pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL on the keyboard, close the program and manually delete the program by following the below steps
3. Empty your C:\temp and/or C:\Windows\Temp directory.
4. Reboot computer (this step is required to successfully complete the next two steps).
5. Ensure that Whagent is not present in the background by pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL again on the keyboard. If present, End Task the item before doing the next two steps, otherwise click Cancel and continue with the next two steps.
6. Delete the directory C:\Program Files\webHancer\ if present.
7. Ensure the below files are no longer present on the computer.

• webhdll.dll
• whagent.inf
• whInstaller.exe
• whInstaller.ini