Vista - Russian Invasion

I just picked up a toolbar that appears in the place of my status bar which I have toggled off. It has a red circled white star, a search box and what looks like some stock ticker numbers and what looks like a weather icon. Cloud with rain.

I haven't a clue where I picked this garbage up and I'm afraid to play with it. I can't find any uninstall info in my system, Win HP 64-bit. No response to right click. The text is Cyrillic and the "looks like weather icon is a live link.

Does anyone have any info on this intruder? I have never even been to a Russian site that I know of. I really want to shove this thing up Ivan's nose.

Since it appeared I haven't been able to get to my home pages in MSN or Yahoo. I can get to the net using my igoogle.

Thanks for any help in this matter.

Do you have UAC turned off?
Use this free Antimalware online scanner/cleaner to check your computer for malware BHO's and Trojans (amongst other things):Free ESET Online Antivirus Scanner

UAC is ON. ESET won't run on any of my browsers. I'm running IE8 Beta, Firefox and Chrome. I keep forgetting IE7 is still around. (For whatever reason) Even Netflix supports 8 now.

Thanks anyway.

Well I hope you are running some kind of antimalware program. Russia is a hotspot for malware, and You are probably infected with trojan downloaders (Amongst other nasties) If the toolbar just "popped" up in your browser on its own, and is "redirecting" or preventing access to igoogle, msn, and yahoo sites.
Either way, For a Trojan/BHO to install it would have had to been allowed through UAC.- once that happens it will download/run other malware silently in the background without further user intervention. The most common ways these kinds of "programs" pass UAC is when they are bundled with fake codecs (porn), shareware, freeware, or peer to peer (torrents) downloads.

Try System Restore to undo the BHO.