IE Crashing

[leeym]

I've got IE 6.0 on WinXP Pro with all the latst updates and patches. However, upon trying to open the browser, nothing happens except for the hourglass appears for a few seconds.

I thought it may be a virus, but Symantec Antivirus says all partitions are clean. I even double checked to make sure that the shortcut is correct.

Any thoughts as to why this would be happening?

Also, as a wrokaround, I've using windows explorer to get out to the Inmternet since this is integrated with IE. After a few clickthroughs this crashes or hangs.

Thoughts?

[gotenks2]

There are several things you can try. Assuming it's only internet explorer (and not the majority of applications) it is probably some kind of spyware/adware/etc that has gotten in there. The first thing you will want to do is have someone burn you a CD with the new versions of both AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy1.3. Once you have those installed, run and update adaware, then perform a full system scan. Let it clean anything it finds there. More than likely, it will ask you if it can scan again after reboot, tell it yes and reboot. Let the scan finish up. Once your back in, start up spybot and run the update in it. Do a full system scan with it. It also will ask you if it can reboot to fix issues if it finds anything it can't kill.

Once you do this you should be in the clear as I deal with quite a few spyware/adware cleanups at work and this sounds very familiar. :) If this by some strange chance doesn't fix your problem there is one other thing you can try. Open up your control panel and use the Add/Remove Programs option. Find the "Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 SP1 with Tools" (Which may not be 100% right, in debian at the moment) and click the add/remove button. This will bring up a box with 3 options for you. One of those options is "Repair Internet Explorer". Click that and continue. It WILL make you reboot when it's done, so make sure your saved/out of everything else you may be doing.

If those two things don't fix your problem, it's probably going to take someone sitting down at your machine and going over it to fix it. That or a reinstall :)

By the way, AdAware and Spybot can both be found at www.download.com. Just type the names into the search bar and they will come up in the first 1-3 items found.

gotenks2

[r-bean]

Originally posted by leeym
I've got IE 6.0 on WinXP Pro with all the latst updates and patches. However, upon trying to open the browser, nothing happens except for the hourglass appears for a few seconds.

I thought it may be a virus, but Symantec Antivirus says all partitions are clean. I even double checked to make sure that the shortcut is correct.

Any thoughts as to why this would be happening?

Also, as a wrokaround, I've using windows explorer to get out to the Inmternet since this is integrated with IE. After a few clickthroughs this crashes or hangs.

Thoughts?
There is a Trojan horse (Js.windowsBomb), that causes those symptoms. I resides in the 1st, 640k of memory. I removed it from my system by re-newing the MBR (master boot record). It has to be done at the dos level. I used the setup disk I got with my Western Digital Hard Drive.