In general if the ToolBar was installed without your knowledge or consent, than I would be suspicious of it, And personally that is malware.

If the toolbar is persistent and very hard to remove, than too me that is malware.

If the toolbar chews up 5% or more of my CPU Usage, its malware.

staigermanus: I can understand you are being defensive because you make the Dogwaffle Toolbar.  But you need to understand not everyone wants/needs a toolbar and if a toolbar behaves badly and starts to slow down my machine, the first thing I want to do is remove it.

Although you may think that anonymous surfing habit information sent to a server is ok, not everyone agrees with that sort of data mining.

There are a lot of dubious toolbars out there, make sure you read up on a toolbar before you install one.