The Gator Corporation, the creators of the spyware Gator, have recently launched an advertising network known as GAIN (Gator Advertising Information Network.) According to The Gator Corporation, the main intent of GAIN is to keep software that participates in GAIN free by running advertisements in the programs.
However, GAIN is a pop-up window machine, often spawning new windows from your taskbar whenever you visit a popular site, such as gap.com, ebay.com or even certain news sites, like abcnews.com. Secondly, it will occasionally open new browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer (always the opposite of the one you use to browse the web), which obviously becomes annoying when browsing the web for anything.
The travesty concerning GAIN is that all programs that use it force the user to install GAIN and agree to its licensing agreements. If choose not to, you can't use the free software. So, the inevitable catch-22 comes into play, forcing you to decide whether you want the free software or not.
GAIN also is a piece of spyware. It tracks your website choices for purchasing things online, though it does not track your history of sites that you have visited. GAIN then uses this information, and advertisers will pay GAIN more to pitch specialty advertising to a consumer.
Personally, I think GAIN is a bunch of consumer tracking bullshit. Forcing you to install it with the freeware is unfair, and since you can't uninstall GAIN without removing the freeware also, they force you to either accept their terms or walk away empty handed.
However, I think I have found a way around GAIN. Take a look in your Windows folder, and look for a file called GatorPdpSetup.log. This contains all the runtime information for GAIN's installation. Find where the files are, and go delete them. Next, there will be a few registry entries you must delete. You can find the location of these a few lines below where the GAIN files are listed. After all of this is done, you have removed GAIN's spyware from your machine.