Brand New!

Check out the Technical forum!

Post your questions or help someone else with theirs!

Administration (newest entry first)  

Administration (oldest entry first)  

New messages (newest message first)  

New messages (oldest messages first)  

Message archive (newest message first)  

Message archive (oldest message first)  

Page creation date: Friday February 1, 2008

Search_Glow - Seems buggy and may actually cause other toolbars to suffer from issues.

I recently ran into a brick wall.  My newly purchased, used, 3 Ghz P4 suddenly grinded to a halt!

I was downloading and installing some software for testing patch monitoring and I also installed Google Earth. Somewhere along the line one of these installs either required or requested Some Microsoft add-ins. The next thing I knew my computer was a dog. Dead slow. I.E. would load but take forever to open the Tabbed home pages I had set.

Suspecting Malware I ran an antivirus sweep and a spysweeper scan. I found Nothing.   I began to notice pop-up errors when I closed I.E. or restarted the machine. They said something about a non-responsive application named Search_glow.

A little time on the web showed me that I was not the only person with this issue.  Lots of people were reporting the same problem or worse.

It turns out that Search_Glow is a process that is part of Windows live Toolbar. I checked and sure enough this toolbar was installed on my machine. (More about what Windows Live Toolbar is father down.)

I ran an uninstall in the Control Panel to remove Windows Live Toolbar and the Search_Glow lockup problem went away.  However,  My problem with Internet Explorer taking forever to load my home pages continued.

I ran the Task Manager to monitor processes and applications and after a lot of test I found nothing wrong.

Since I had ruled out just about everything else I decided to see if installing Google Earth was the problem.  Sure enough,  I must have missed a check box or something because Google Toolbar was installed. Uninstalling it fixed the load issue.

Now, I am not sure why Google Toolbar was hanging up I.E. 7. Afterall it is a fairly common I.E. add-in that millions have installed. It was perhaps just an issue with it accessing it’s home site this particular day, but just in case I thought I would mention it. There is a very real possibility based on my experience that Windows Live Toolbar and Googles Toolbar don’t play nice together.

As for Search_Glow and the Windows live Toolbar. I did some further checking. It seems that Microsoft is using this new add-in as a way of competing with some of Google’s search features. It is apparently bundled with many popular downloaded programs, so down loaders beware. Especially since it may not appear after being installed.  One of Cnet’s initial reviews from Back in 2006 explains why I didn’t notice it.

“Initially after installation, Windows Live Toolbar 3 didn't appear within IE. To make it show up, we selected Tools under IE's View drop-down menu. The Toolbar then appeared with its search field and icons below IE's address bar.”

See http://reviews.cnet.com/online-software-services/windows-live-toolbar/4505-9239_7-31794292.html for the rest of the review.

If anyone knows of a problem with Googles Toolbar loading on this date, please let me know so I can eliminate the Search_Glow problem as a cause for that also.

Do a search on Search_Glow to find plenty of people who have had the same issue.