Hotbar is one of the very common infections in the antispyware bizz. Spywarewarrior.com has made a full report as to the state of Hotbar detections in the industry. It compares Ad-aware, CounterSpy, McAfee, Microsoft, Pest Patrol, Spy Sweeper, Spyware Doctor, Trend Micro, X-cleaner, and ZeroSpyware. It shows the quality of the spyware threat database of each products involved:

http://www.spywarewarrior.com/elh/hotbar-detections.htm

The link above is actually part of a larger article that compares a lot of antispyware products and is very interesting to read and compare. As you can see, CounterSpy is doing pretty good!

http://www.spywarewarrior.com/elh/adw-state.htm