• klseesea
• May 18,2009
• In: Software & Tools

PDFCreator with PDFForge is causing havoc with toolbar install

PDFCreator, formerly a respected open source product, is causing havoc with a malware install toolbar. Amazingly SourceForge hasn’t done anything about this yet and still lists the software, and for many their trust level is shaken as well.

Here are the latest features though:

PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application. 
We are proud to announce the release of PDFCreator 0.9.8 
Again, we have some improvements 
* Uses GPL-Ghostscript 8.64 now. 
* Improved PDF/A compatibility. 
* New output format SVG (experimental) 
* Improved check for updates on PDFCreator. 
* Improved COM interface 
* plus small fixes and improvements

Some of the users comments

“I would strongly recommend that one does not install this version of PDFCreator. Even if I didn’t choose to install the toolbar, it installed pdfforge Toolbar. Now, all 404s are redirected to urlseek20.vmn.net. You can search the web and find out the headaches people have had with urlseek20.vmn.net.”

Here I summarize my findings on this issue.

Symptoms

Navigating to a non-existing website, which would otherwise deliver a 404 Cannot be found error, redirects to a Yahoo-partnered search at urlseek20.vmn.net.

How to remove this malware

Open Add/Remove Programs by going to Control Panel in Windows.
Uninstall the PDFforge toolbar.

Cause

Installing PDFCreator also installs the PDFforge toolbar, which affects 404 URL navigations in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Alternative to PDF Creator, you can try DoPDF (lightweight and fast).

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