Hi

I'm on the work pooter here using windows explorer rather than Internet explorer! I had some spyware stuff which I removed with our spyware removing stuff and now IE6 doesn't work! It opens up but when you try select a page it says it can't start it. Obviously the internet connection works! Email also works fine...any thoughts!

BTW, some registry keys were removed...

 

You've answered the question yourself. The tool you used to fix a problem created one. System Restore perhaps? A lot of vendors are finding that detection is easy, it's the repair that will bite.

 

re-install IE6 (or ask your IT department) or better still, install FireFox

BTW, windows explorer is your file manager, not a web browser. If you can access the internet via that you are lauching IE from a shortcut there. I would say your shortcut might be borked on your desktop or your start menu, or where ever you normally launch it from.

Have you tried launching IE from the C:/Program Files/ location?

 

Download and install Firefox....much better, free, faster, pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. www.mozilla.org

 

Whatever you do don't download bloody Firefox, downloading yet more crap onto your machine won't help it right now. Do a system restore, change your Spyware product, see if that does a better job repairing.

Soulgirl, instead of c:\whatever you can use explorer to access remote site.

 

OK, I don't think we have a system restore, could be wrong though! The machine is on 2000.

We've tried re-installing IE6, no joy, I've tried opening it from the taskbar, desktop and from program files, still no joy!

My boss doesn't want us to use Firefox.

Anything else?

 

Would it be your spyware blocking you using IE just a guess really

Try removing spyware and reinstall IE

 

Your "spyware stuff" should have logs of what it removed. Analyse those logs.

Sound like the spyware had hooked into ie and is proxying your requests. Look for BHO's, Browser Helper Object.

 

Yeah I think it has logs, deffo has a quarantine (SP?). If I find and BHOs, do I restore or delete them?

 

I've restored the log file things and it seems to work ok now

Still have the spyware stuff on though......is it a problem or should I just leave it?

 

If there's a spyware entry called 'DSO exploit', try leaving that one behind and getting rid of the rest. I'm not entirely sure what it is - I know it's a registry change - but my PC became very unstable when I allowed it to be 'fixed'.

 

What on earth makes you suggest FireFox is crap? You are mistaken.

 

Have a look for msams or dust running as a process. I have been beating my head of the wall all week with a similar problem, made worse by a dodgy router, but is seems that msams might be tied in with elite search toolbar. I cleaned it by deleting all the files created at the same time and having a reg clearout. This seemed OK until I went back to the net. 404's everywhere. borrowed a sniffer from another pal and discovered that some part of msams.exe was still resident and was sending out about 16 Meg a minute worth of braodcasts. This was competing for bandwidth with the rest of the kit, so all the PC's timed out before they could load a page