For the moment I uninstalled the Conduit Search & Search Protect and will make a few more How-to's before uninstalling IncrediMail.
Now that I say that I'm split on do I want to be promoting IncrediMail with help guides or hope those drive people to land here, see this discussion, and move on to a different mail program?
When trying to uninstall the Search it automatically rebooted my computer without asking me and guess what the first thing to appear in my system tray was?
Search Protect.
I was able to uninstall it on the second try:
It wasn't clear at first but Search Protect also appears to be Conduit since my firewall alerts started going off alerting me that it was trying to connect back to the Conduit servers.
A CCleaner scan only found a couple registry problems related to broken IncrediMail default icons etc.
My
Malwarebytes scan is still running and has found 4 problems, after the uninstall, on a computer that usually has 0 problems.
My Avast never alerted me to any problems.
Looking back at my review from 2008 it looks like the IncrediMail partners have changed, but they still play a shady game after having been acquired by the Malware company Conduit in 2013, reinforcing that IncrediMail (and the apps it's installs) are spamware / spyware / malware.
It's terrible. It hijacks new tabs, search preferences, who knows what else.
The only comforting thought here is that I was already planning on getting a new computer to finally replace my old Windows XP.