Password Recovery Bar

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on February 27, 2009

The good news is that others won't be able to retrieve your password information. The bad news is that you may not be able to figure out how to either. Password Recovery Bar installs quickly and easily, but the seemingly simple interface wasn't so easy to understand.

One click on the browser icon adds a three-part sidebar to the window that includes a toolbar, a tree list, and a password display area at the bottom. The toolbar buttons to save, refresh and export data are understandable, but it isn't clear how the program pulls in or accesses password information. The same is true of the familiar tree list categories: Internet Explorer Data, Other identities and Outlook Express. However, opening the areas didn't show any information, with the exception of Outlook Express, which included an account we didn't recognize and a password that wasn't ours. The Help file wouldn't open for our testers, so we couldn't get any clarification on how the program works. The one thing in Password Recovery Bar that did work was the persistent nag screen that dogged nearly every action our testers tried to make. It was so disruptive that we lost the desire to keep trying to get the program to work.

The demo version notes that only the first three characters of the password are displayed, but this may be the least of your worries when trying out this unintuitive application. There are a lot of options in the password recovery category. Many of the options surpass Password Recovery Bar in simplicity and effectiveness. Unless you like to solve puzzles, skip this password recovery tool.