Hotspot Shield residue after deinstallation

[tidakditahu]

Thanks for the info! I recently installed the latest version of HSS (it was recommended by AxCrypt, sadly) and it slowed my network connection way down for a few hours and then disabled it completely. Uninstalling HSS very carefully (due to the many warnings online) immediately reenabled the connection upon reboot. Maybe their uninstaller has improved lately and this wasn't all necessary, but I wanted it as clean as possible.

BTW, I'm describing the latest version of HSS auto-installed by AxCrypt as of 25 July 2012 or so, version 2.52 (installer was HSS-2.52-install-p76-335-conduit.exe dated 1 May 2012).

Before uninstalling, I checked Device Manager under network adapters (show hidden), and copied the Device Instance Id's of the four "Anchorfree HSS Adapter..." devices there. Here's what they were on my WinXPSP3 32-bit machine:
ROOT\NET\0000
ROOT\SW_ASWNDISMP\0004
ROOT\MS_HSSDRVMP\0003
ROOT\MS_PSCHEDMP\0003
Searching the registry with regedit found quite a few occurrences of each of these.

Next, I used msconfig to disable all the HSS services. Still couldn't successfully Repair my network connection. Next, I rebooted into Safe Mode No Networking and ran the HSS uninstaller. It succeeded, and one thing it said it was uninstalling was TAP VPN. Using regedit, it looks like the uninstall failed to remove those registry entries above.

Next, I rebooted normally, and my (wireless) network adapter immediately started working again. I also went into Network Connections and manually removed the item for HSS from one of the connections (this removes it from all connections). I forget its exact name; something like "Anchorfree HSS Helper".

Checking with regedit, all of those entries above are now gone! I figured there might still be other extra pieces lying around, so I installed the free version of Special Uninstaller. But I guess I did this too late; it couldn't see HSS anymore, and with nothing under Program Files anymore, I couldn't tell it what to try to uninstall.

should be something like ROOT\hss****\000* or something