Bonzi the Evil Monkey Buddy

You want to eliminate all those annoying ads appearing in your desktop without permission? You want to banish the monkey that’s driving you crazy? You want to hit the uninstall key?

So let me tell you about my experience with Bonzi:

I should have been a little suspicious of a website which leaves lots of ads the moment I leave it. But what really ticked me off about Bonzi was that after asking me twice whether I wanted to make his home my home page and receiving ‘No’ twice for an answer, my homepage was converted to Bonzi’s ad-ridden page anyway. Why bother asking then is what I ask. In fact a single visit to Bonzi’s webpage will convert it into your homepage without the need for any further action on your part. But the worse of this devious treacherous creature was yet to come.

Within hours of downloading it, I noticed that ads had started to pop out of nowhere even when I was not even surfing the Web. So I uninstalled Bonzi that same day (Start, then Control Panel, then Add/Remove Programs). But the random ads persisted. So I uninstalled the program that came with it, called SaveNow or something like that. But the random ads –you guessed it—persisted.

Then I found a directory C:\Program Files\TimeSink\AdGateway in my hard drive, which included a program TsAdBot.exe that was running in the background. So I deleted the entire folder and stopped the program (in Windows NT & 2000, Ctrl-Alt-Del and then Task Manager, then Processes).

This seems to have been the end of the battle. And I have won.

But the war continues. Who knows a good class-action lawyer who's willing to take on Bonzi.com and Lycos for illegal invasion of privacy and deceit?

On April 29, 2002, I received the following from Mike, at BONZI software: Hi, Alex. I was doing a customary scan for Bonzi information on the 'net and came across your Evil Monkey page. Just thought that I'd let you know a couple of things. First, the home page issue was caused by a problem with the Google Toolbar. If your home page changed automatically, there was a conflict in the Google toolbar that was causing it. We worked with Google and they fixed that issue in their new version of the toolbar. Just download a new toolbar and the problem will not persist. And the program that you mention (tsadbot.exe) is not installed by Bonzi. We give an optional install of SaveNow which offers deals based on the sites you visit (some label it spyware, but that's up to the discretion of the person who is labeling it as such - we trust the company not to sell or track personal information, but that's ultimately up to SaveNow, not Bonzi Software). You have the option not to install SaveNow when BonziBUDDY is installed. But the main issue is that the TSADBOT.exe file you had was not installed by Bonzi. Here's a good information page on that program that I found, it seems the company's name was Conducent but has since gone out of business... http://www.cexx.org/tsadbot.htm If you have any questions at all about BonziBUDDY or Bonzi.com Software, please let me know and I'll be happy to help you. Sincerely, Mike BONZI Software PS: if you post any further information about this issue, please don't use my personal e-mail address. If you want to refer people, please use http://www.bonzi.com to refer them. There's a link to Support in the lower left corner of the page. Thanks.